From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2003-12-19T08:48:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Yukihiro - Please ensure backwards compatibility

Joseph Benik wrote:

> blah.gsub!("testing", ' ')
> i got a message that it was going to ignore(?) this statement as
> "testing" was not a regexp.....  this hit me on more than one script,
> forcing me into a quick-fix mode as i definitely was not anticipating
> this script-debilitating "ignore" of my code...

Your statement won't be ignored, there will just be that warning. Why? 
Because "...bar".gsub(".", "foo") produces "foofoofoobar" and not 
"foofoofoofoofoofoo". This wasn't always this way -- in Ruby 1.6.8 
Strings were handled just like Regexps in this case. I myself really 
prefer the current behaviour to the old one because the old one is still 
available (use /#{foo}/) and this allows you to easily substitute user 
input without using the longish Regexp.escape() which would be forgotten 
way to often and thus cause security risks anyway.

The warning will go away in 1.9.0, AFAIK. I'd suggest either using 
/#{Regexp.escape(foo)}/ or disabling the warnings via the 
-W0-command-line-option or $-w = nil for now.

Regards,
Florian Gross