From: Jon Garvin <jgarvin.lists@...>
Date: 2009-02-11T03:12:07+09:00
Subject: regex to escape special characters

I've got the following string...

"This is ( a test"

And I want to do a regex gsub on it to turn it into...

"This is \( a test"

In irb, If I start with...

 "This is ( a test".gsub(/[\(]/,'\&')        => "This is ( a test"

And then progressively added more backslashes, I get the following
results, none of which are what I'm looking for.  The second one is,
IMO, the one that should work.

"This is ( a test".gsub(/[\(]/,'\\&')   => "This is ( a test"
"This is ( a test".gsub(/[\(]/,'\\\&')  => "This is \\& a test"
"This is ( a test".gsub(/[\(]/,'\\\\&') => "This is \\& a test"
"This is ( a test".gsub(/[\(]/,'\\\\\&')=> "This is \\( a test"


Am I just having a serious case of the mondays, or is there a bug in how
Ruby deals with \ characters when trying to represent an actual single \
character?

I'm using ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i486-linux]

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