From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2002-05-15T07:30:27+09:00
Subject: Strange Ruby String behavior

I discovered some bizarre behavior in Ruby, and I wonder if there's an 
answer.  I don't believe it is a bug, per se, but it is strange.

I had the following line of code:

   PUBIDCHAR = "\x20\x0D\x0Aa-zA-Z0-9-()+,./:=?;!*#@$_%"

See the '#' near the end?  The strange thing is that, time after time, this 
didn't cause Ruby 1.6.6 to choke on my Linux box -- however, when Markus 
tried to run it on 1.6.5 on his machine (some Unix or Linux variant, I'm 
not sure which), it gave him an error:

  /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.6/rexml/entity.rb:8: compile error in 
string expansion (SyntaxError)

Was this something that changed between 1.6.5 and 1.6.6, or am I seeing 
something else?  The question is probably moot; I moved the hash to the end 
of the string and there are no problems.  I'm just curious.

--- SER