From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2003-01-27T18:44:41+09:00
Subject: Very nasty piece of code

Whilest writing my RTF tools library I had a need to convert from &#XX; 
(XML entity style) into \'XX (RTF entity style). I ended up with this 
monstrosity...

while string =~ /(&#([0-9a-fA-F]{2});)/ do
   # Converting from &#XX; to \'XX

   string.sub!($1, "\\\\\\\''#{$2}")
end

It seems to work but what is going on here? It looks like Java or TCL on 
a bad day and was only arrived at by adding random numbers of \ and ' 
until it worked.

Surely there is a better way to do this.