On Aug 25, 2004, at 9:17, Austin Ziegler wrote: > No, it's *not* a regex standard. It's a Perl standard. Regex > "standard" is \1, \2, etc. for backreferences. Look at "ri MatchData" > and you'll begin to see the Object behind a Regexp result -- and > that's the Ruby Way to do it. I think I'd rather phrase that as "that's _a_ Ruby way to do it." 90% of the time, I personally find $1 and friends far more convenient, and use Regexp#match only when I need the match results to be long-lived. Cheers Dave