From: "Pena, Botp" <botp@...>
Date: 2008-12-12T12:13:58+09:00
Subject: Re: problems in String type argument for Regular Expression

From: Jun Young Kim [mailto:jykim@altibase.com] 
# I mean I have a regular expression as a string.
# puts aPattern
# => "/[aeiou]/"
# When I convert it as a Regexp instance, the result is
# => /\/[aeiou]\//
# At this point, the given regular pattern is not regular expression  
# anymore, it's just a string.

it is stil a regex, not just the regex that you expected though.

you can either remove the surrounding slashes

s="/[aeiou]/"
Regexp.new s[1..-2]
#=> /[aeiou]/

or you can just eval it straight away

eval(s)
#=> /[aeiou]/