From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2010-01-14T19:15:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Regex

Robert Klemme wrote:
> For me there is actually something weird about Ruby's escape handling
> - but it's something else: in some circumstances Ruby allows you to
> *omit* a backslash which is meant to be convenient (I believe) but
> which leads to a certain inconsistency:
> 
> irb(main):014:0> '\1'  # this might be seen as surprising
> => "\\1"

I think the principle is "single quoting does the absolute minimum 
amount of dequoting".

However it *has* to support a way to get a single-quote within a 
single-quoted string, and they chose \'. As a consequence, it *has* to 
support \\ to get a single backslash within a single-quoted string.

The question then is, should any other sequence like \1 raise an error, 
or return literal \ and 1 ?

The alternative would have been to use two single quotes where you want 
a single quote within a string:

   'It''s that time of day'

I quite like that, but arguably it's just confusing in a different way.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.