From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-02-22T22:17:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Weird behaviour escaping special characters in a string

2007/2/21, Greg Hurrell <greg.hurrell@gmail.com>:
> This instance method added to the String class returns a copy of the
> receiver with occurrences of \ replaced with \\, and occurrences of '
> replaced with \':
>
> class String
>   def to_source_string
>     gsub(/(\\|')/, '\\\\\1')
>   end
> end
>
> The idea is that it will give you a string that you can write out a
> Ruby file that will later print the string. For, example, let's take
> the string, foo (3 characters):
>
> "puts '" + "foo".to_source_string + "'" # puts 'foo'
>
> Or a string with special characters in it like 'foo' (5 characters,
> including enclosing single quotes):
>
> "puts '" + "'foo'".to_source_string + "'" # puts '\'foo\''

Why don't you just use #inspect?

Kind regards

robert