From: Marnen Laibow-Koser <marnen@...>
Date: 2010-01-14T02:49:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Regex

Gary Wright wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2010, at 10:56 AM, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
>> 
>> ...and Ruby's stupid backslash handling strikes again.  This is a 
>> completely brain-dead way to do it, and is one of the few things I 
>> really hate about Ruby.
> 
> Is this really a Ruby snafu? 

Yes.  The problem is that Ruby "helpfully" does another level of 
escaping, so that "\\&" is equivaIent to "\&", whereas it should simply 
take the escape at face value and consider it equivalent to the two 
characters \ and &.

For real fun, try concatenating two strings, the first of which ends in 
a backslash.  It's insane.

> It seems like it would be inherent in
> any sort of character escape sequence, of which there are many
> examples that have nothing at all to do with Ruby.
>

But Ruby has its own special brand of idiocy here.  Even Perl and PHP 
get this right.

> Any pointers to alternative encoding schemes that avoid this problem?

It has nothing to do with encoding.  It's a question of a particular 
point of stupidity in Ruby's parser and/or String class.

> 
> 
> Gary Wright

Best,
-- 
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
marnen@marnen.org
-- 
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