From: Philip Mak <pmak@...>
Date: 2003-09-13T06:20:56+09:00
Subject: Re: String#start_with? / #end_with?

Ryan Pavlik wrote:
>     "Hello world".match /^Hello/   # => MatchData
>     "Hello world".match /^world/   # => nil

The solution for matching using regexps isn't that simple. It's more
like this:

    "Hello world".match /^#{Regexp.escape('hello')}/

because if the substring I'm checking for contains characters that
would be considered special in a regexp, then they must be escaped or
else it'll cause a (possibly silent) error. So I don't like this
solution so much since it essentially amounts to typing:

    big_string.match(/^#{Regexp.escape(little_string)}/)

instead of simply:

    big_string.start_with?(little_string)