Ruby gsub doesn't escape single-quotes
I don't understand what is going on here. How should I feed gsub to get the string "Yaho\'o"?
>> "Yaho'o".gsub("Y", "\\Y")
=> "\\Yaho'o"
>> "Yaho'o".gsub("'", "\\'")
=> "Yahooo"
Solution 1:
\' means $' which is everything after the match. Escape the \ again and it works
"Yaho'o".gsub("'", "\\\\'")
Solution 2:
"Yaho'o".gsub("'", "\\\\'")
Because you're escaping the escape character as well as escaping the single quote.
Solution 3:
This will also do it, and it's a bit more readable:
def escape_single_quotes(str)
str.gsub(/'/) { |x| "\\#{x}" }
end
If you want to escape both a single-quote and a backslash, so that you can embed that string in a double-quoted ruby string, then the following will do that for you:
def escape_single_quotes_and_backslash(str)
str.gsub(/\\|'/) { |x| "\\#{x}" }
end