From: Dave Oshel <dcoshel@...>
Date: 2003-05-23T05:23:47+09:00
Subject: why is "does" missing from this sub!-stitution?

[~/Desktop] dave$ cat foobar.rb ; foobar.rb
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

# get a Stanislaw Lem quote containing underscores and backspaces, then
# replace the word following the deleted underscores and backspaces
# with the same word surrounded by emphatic arrow glyphs

`fortune -m Nillity`.each do |x|
   x.sub!( /(_+\010+)([a-zA-Z]+)/, "-->#{$2}<--" )
   print x
end



This produces:


(science)
%
Everyone knows that dragons don't exist.  But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the 
scientific
mind.  The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly 
unconcerned
with what --><-- exist.  Indeed, the banality of existence has been
so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further
here.  The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically,
discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical,
and the purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent,
but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ...
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%


The word "does" should appear between the --><-- glyphs:

-->does<--

but it doesn't.  What am I overlooking?  I'll admit to being a Perl 
convert, so maybe I'm trying to do something non-Ruby?

TIA,
dave

-- 
["10110100101101000101000000100010100001100110111010010110001001100000010011000010011101000000010011110010110011100001011010100110001101101001000010010000001001101100011011110110110011100001011010100110001101100000001010110110100001101100011001110100110001101111011010110110010100001100001010100110001001101000011001001110000001000100101010000110000011101001011000100110110011100011010000000100100100101000001010010000000101100010111000101110000011100101110011110100111101000001011011110110101101101010011000001110100001101110011010100110011101001011011010000110110001100111010011000110111101101011011011110100001001101100011011110110110011100001011010100110001101101111010001010000010001001001101010100110001011100000010010000010011101101111011000101110000101101010011001001110000001000100101010101110010001101001111000000100000100101000011011000110110101101010011001001110"].pack("b*")