From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2007-02-21T21:28:40+09:00
Subject: Re: interpolation of escaped characters in strings

On Feb 21, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Harold Hausman wrote:

> On 2/21/07, Eyal Oren <eyal.oren@gmail.com> wrote:
>> E.g. a = 'test\nbreak'. Then "puts a.inspect" doesn't actually  
>> print a
>> line break, it prints the  characters '\n'. I would like to transform
>> "a" into a string that really includes a linebreak instead of the
>> characters '\n'.
>>
>
> It looks like you're running into the fact that when you create a
> string literal with a single quote (') it's treated differently than
> when you construct the literal with double quotes...

Problem is he reads the string 'foo\nbar' from an external source,  
that is, the string has a literal slash and a literal n within. He  
wants a nice way to convert that and any other escape sequence into  
an actual escape sequence.

-- fxn