From: "Wesley J. Landaker" <wjl@...>
Date: 2003-07-23T02:16:32+09:00
Subject: Re: String substitution without RegEx

Apparently, ts recently wrote:
>>>>>> "A" == Andreas Schwarz <usenet@andreas-s.net> writes:
>
> A> I would still need a function to remove backreferences from the A>
> replacement string. It's possible, of course, but it hurts me that I A>
> have to use such "hacks" for a simple substitution.
>
>  Perhaps with Regexp#escape
>
> svg% ruby -e 'p "[]{}".gsub(/#{Regexp.escape("]{")}/,
> Regexp.escape("\\1"))' "[\\1}"
> svg%

And then, so you don't have to type that all every time, just make it a
method of String. Being able to do this is one of the best features of
Ruby. =)

class String
  def simple_sub(from,to)
    sub(/#{Regexp.escape(from)}/,Regexp.escape(to))
  end
end

Wes