From: Jayce Meade Date: 2009-02-06T06:26:22+09:00 Subject: Re: irb and single quoted strings \ is an escape character for strings. For example, using a = 'Today is the day, I'm going to New Jersey' is interpreted as a = 'Today is the day, I' m going to New Jersey ' This tosses an error because the interpreter assumes the apostrophe in I'm is the end of the string. The \ escapes that apostrophe so that it's merely text in the string, not a Ruby operator. The above line would also error out because 'm', 'going', 'to', 'new', and 'jersey' are unknown methods, and then also because the last ' was read as the beginning of another string, causing the string to run to the end of the file and the interpreter yelling at you because the string wasn't terminated. (In other contexts it would run until the next occurrence of the ' character, tossing other errors.) Same thing happens with the backslash. \ = Escape character \\ = \ in a string Example: irb(main):001:0> puts "c:\documents" c:documents => nil Here the \ is merely an escape character and thus does nothing since there's no special characters after it. On the other hand: irb(main):002:0> puts "c:\\documents" c:\documents => nil The \\ becomes \ because it used the first backslash as the escape character for the second backslash. I hope that helps. - jayce -------------------------------------------------- From: "James Byrne" Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 12:50 PM Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby To: "ruby-talk ML" Subject: irb and single quoted strings > This is the problem: > > irb(main):002:0> x = '--rails --exclude something_is_not_right > \/usr\/lib,test\/lib' > => "--rails --exclude something_is_not_right \\/usr\\/lib,test\\/lib" > > irb(main):004:0> p x > "--rails --exclude something_is_not_right \\/usr\\/lib,test\\/lib" > > How do I get a literal string like /usr\/lib,test\/lib into a variable? > Where are these extra '\' artifacts coming from? > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > >