From: Daniel DeLorme <dan-ml@...42.com>
Date: 2007-09-12T08:53:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Substitution with Hash

Lee Jarvis wrote:
> Thanks that worked well, And no its not single chars, Which is the only 
> reason i'm doing it this way..
> 
> I have to split on whitespace (/ /) because spliting on characters would 
> obviously split the text i want to transform, which means it wont match 
> if the characters are trailing another word, HTML special chars for 
> example
> 
> h = {"&#126;" => "~"}

If you're just trying to translate numeric html entities it's easy:
   str.gsub(/&#(\d+);/){ [$1.to_i].pack('U') }
If you also want named entities I suggest the htmlentities gems.
If it's for a more general case, how about:
   rx = Regexp.new(hash.keys.map{|k|Regexp.escape(k)}.join("|"))
   str.gsub(rx){ hash[$&] }

Daniel