From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2002-05-15T07:42:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange Ruby String behavior

Hello --

On Wed, 15 May 2002, Sean Russell wrote:

> 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.

It looks like is was a change.   Scanning the 1.6.6 ChangeLog:

   * parse.y (str_extend): should not process immature #$x and
       #@x interportation, e.g #@#@ etc.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav