From: Amishera Amishera <amishera2007@...>
Date: 2010-04-01T07:07:03+09:00
Subject: how to solve this regular expression problem

I have strings of this form:

s = 'C#039;era una volta il east'

I want to replace '#039;' with the octal representation of 39 ie 47 so
the string becomes

s = 'C\47era una volta il east'

I have tried this:

  1 def conv_char(num)
  2         puts num.to_i.to_s(8)
  3         num.to_i.to_s(8)
  4 end
  5
  6 if __FILE__ == $0
  7         s = 'C#039;era'
  8         s.gsub!(/#(\d+);/, conv_char("\1"))
  9         puts s
 10 end

The outptu i get is
0
'C#0era una volta il east'

I even tried
 8         s.gsub!(/#(\d+);/, conv_char('\1'))
 8         s.gsub!(/#(\d+);/, conv_char($1))

nothing seems to work.

how to solve this gracefully? I guess I can do that using double
replacement like collecting the matched patterns (#039;) using scan
method and then converting and doing another gsub using a for loop. But
that seems to much for the poor regular expression engine.
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