From: "Wolfgang Nádasi-Donner" <wonado@...>
Date: 2007-01-22T00:35:06+09:00
Subject: Re: gsub and backslashes

John Wright schrieb:
> Say I want to replace all occurrences of \ in a string with \\:
> 
> test = "a string with \\ a backslash"
> puts test.gsub(/\\/, "\\\\") #no worky
> => a string with \ a backslash
> 
> puts test.gsub(/\\/, "\\\\\\") #why does this work?
> => a string with \\ a backslash
> 
> Why does the replacement string have to be six backslashes? Hopefully
> this is really simple and I'm just being dense...
> 

Ooops

irb(main):005:0> puts "a string with \\ a backslash".gsub(/\\/, "\\\\\\\\")
a string with \\ a backslash

This works as expected, but why it works with '\'*6 I don't understand.

Wolfgang Nádasi-Donner