From: renton.dan@...
Date: 2008-10-04T01:08:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Explain this ruby regex

On Oct 3, 11:44 am, Ben Bleything <b...@bleything.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 04, 2008, renton....@gmail.com wrote:
> > "one two".scan(/\w*/).length
>
> > returns 4. I can see it matching the 2 words and the space, what else
> > is it matching on? Is there a null terminator, I thought Ruby strings
> > were not null termed.
>
> Try replacing #length with #inspect and seeing what the output of scan
> is.  You'll find that it's returning two empty strings as well.  I
> suspect what you really want is \w+...
>
> Ben

Yeah, you're right \w+ will pull out the words, which is what I want
anyway. Though I'm trying to understand what \w* is doing.
irb(main):015:0> "one two".scan(/\w*/).inspect
=> "[\"one\", \"\", \"two\", \"\"]"

My question is, what is the last "\", where does it come from.