From: Ronald Fischer <ronald.fischer@...>
Date: 2007-09-10T20:55:25+09:00
Subject: gsub! and quoting question

I thought this would be a trivial task, but it seems to be more
difficult than expected:

I have a variable, data, containing some string. I would like to
preprend every
single apostrophe in this string by a backslash. Here is my solution:

   data.gsub!(/'/,%q(\\'))

Strangely, this does not work. I tested it with data containing a string
consisting
of a single quote solely, and surrounded the code by "puts" like this:

data=%q(')
puts ":"+data+" replace quotes by "+%q(\\')
        data.gsub!(/'/,%q(\\'))
puts "data length now #{data.length}"

This produced as output:

:' replace quotes by \'
data length now 0

From this I conclude that the gsub! had shortened the string to length
zero.
Any explanation for this? How do I solve my problem in a proper way?

Ronald


-- 
Ronald Fischer <ronald.fischer@venyon.com>
Phone: +49-89-452133-162