From: Ron Coutts <rcoutts@...>
Date: 2003-11-12T07:41:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Backslash substitution question

Thanks for all the help everybody and the quick turnaround, you've saved
me some valuable time.  I wasn't aware of the 'quoted and escaped'
versions of these strings.  

To reply to Eric, usually on win32 I just use '/' and let Ruby handle it
for me but the script I'm working on now has to enter this string into a
Windows GUI app edit field and that app doesn't like '/', that's why I
had to convert it myself.

Hal, what did you mean by 'calling p'?

Thanks again,
Ron

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hal Fulton [mailto:hal9000@hypermetrics.com] 
> Sent: November 11, 2003 3:26 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: Backslash substitution question
> 
> 
> Ron Coutts wrote:
> > I'm having trouble with backslashes and I don't know what 
> is wrong.  I
> > can't seem to write and expression that will evaluate to a string
> > containing a single backslash character as in "\".  It 
> seems that "\\"
> > in Ruby evaluates to "\\" not to "\" as I would expect.  
> Below are a few
> > things I've tried.  If anyone could send back a quick 
> answer it would be
> > much appreciated.
> > 
> > res = "c:/foo/bar".gsub(/\//, "\\")   # -> c:\\foo\\bar
> 
> This one works. You're getting confused by either irb
> or by calling p. You're seeing the escaped form, but it's
> not stored that way internally.
> 
> Note that res.length is 10, not 12.
> 
> Hal
> 
>