From: 7stud -- <bbxx789_05ss@...>
Date: 2011-04-22T11:20:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing text

A pipe is one of the special regex characters--it does not stand for a 
literal pipe.  A pipe is used in a regex to mean 'OR'.

There several other ways to escape the special regex characters, so that 
they will lose their special meaning and match themselves:

1)  You can use a backslash to escape the pipe.

2) You can put the pipe in a character class:

str = ">ruby ruby |ruby|ruby ruby|text_i_want| test test"

pieces = str.split(/[|]/)
puts pieces[3]

--output:--
text_i_want

3) You can call Regexp.escape to escape any special regex characters 
contained in the string, so that they lose their special meaning:

str = ">ruby ruby |ruby|ruby ruby|text_i_want| test test"

pattern = "|"
esc_str = Regexp.escape(pattern)

pieces = str.split(/#{esc_str}/)
puts pieces[3]

--output:--
text_i_want

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