From: "Peña, Botp" <botp@...>
Date: 2008-09-02T19:21:22+09:00
Subject: Re: escaping '

From: John Pritchard-williams [mailto:monojohnny@googlemail.com] 
# David Nguyen wrote:
# > I need to replace ' by \'. How can I do that?
# This was harder than I thought...in "vi"(vim actually) I just had to:
# 1,$ s/'/\\'/g
# But Ruby didn't seem to like that....
# Anyway, for reasons unknown to me, this works:

how i wish the behaviour would change.
search the archives. this is a faq :) 
 
# puts "'hello'".gsub("'","\\\\'")

if like me, you want to lessen the those fences :)
try,

"'hello'".gsub("'") { "\\'" }
#=> "\\'hello\\'"

or

"'hello'".gsub "'", %q[\\\']
#=> "\\'hello\\'"

for obvious reason, my brain prefers the former

kind regards -botp