From: Thom Harp <thomharp@...>
Date: 2001-12-12T12:44:11+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28315] group substitution doesn't work in character classes?

I'm trying to remove quoted substrings from a string.  The substrings may be
quoted with single or double quotes so I use the following regular expression
which I thought would find the first quote character and remove everything up
to the next occurance of that same character:

/(['"])[^\1]*\1/

but the \1 doesn't seem to be interpreted within the negative character class.
This line:

puts %q|'a"b'c"d'e"|.sub(/(['"])[^\1]*\1/, "X")

prints:
Xe"

and I would expect it to print:
Xc"d'e"

Is this a bug or is it expected that group substitution doesn't work in
character classes?

Thanks!