From: badboy <badboy@...>
Date: 2009-02-11T03:47:57+09:00
Subject: Re: regex to escape special characters

Jon Garvin schrieb:
> 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]
> 
you know Regexp.escape ?