From: "Florian Groß" <flgr@...>
Date: 2003-07-24T11:43:38+09:00
Subject: Re: "regex literal in condition"

Moin!

Daniel Carrera wrote:

> Thanks for the explanation, but I'm not quite following.
> I now understand what a string literal is, but I don't quite get the 
> problem at the if.

Well, in Ruby constructs like 'if /foo/' currently have a special 
meaning. It's not just a check to see whether '/foo/' is true as it is 
in all other cases (like, for example, 'if 5').

However in Perl 'if /foo/' really means 'if $_ =~ /foo/' and I guess 
that Ruby is just imitating that behaviour so that Perl users aren't 
suprised.

I think that matz wants to deprecate this as it is a special case (and 
special cases are Bad Things) -- you could get the current behaviour 
without a warning with 'if ~/foo/':

| ---------------------------------------------------------- Regexp#~
| ~ rxp -> anInteger or nil
| -------------------------------------------------------------------
| Match---Matches rxp against the contents of $_. Equivalent to rxp
| =~ $_.
|    $_ = "input data"
|    ~ /at/   #=> 7

To make long things short: 'if /foo/' should be replaced with 'if 
~/foo/' when wanting to match.

> Thanks for the help.

No problem! :)

Regards,
flgr