On 2/21/07, Xavier Noria <fxn / hashref.com> wrote:
> On Feb 21, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Harold Hausman wrote:
>
> > On 2/21/07, Eyal Oren <eyal.oren / gmail.com> wrote:
> >> E.g. a = 'test\nbreak'. Then "puts a.inspect" doesn't actually
> >> print a
> >> line break, it prints the  characters '\n'. I would like to transform
> >> "a" into a string that really includes a linebreak instead of the
> >> characters '\n'.
> >>
> >
> > It looks like you're running into the fact that when you create a
> > string literal with a single quote (') it's treated differently than
> > when you construct the literal with double quotes...
>
> Problem is he reads the string 'foo\nbar' from an external source,
> that is, the string has a literal slash and a literal n within. He
> wants a nice way to convert that and any other escape sequence into
> an actual escape sequence.
>

Dah!

I didn't even see that there were even earlier messages. I apologize.
What's worse, is that even after looking at this for 20+ mins, I still
don't see a way to cleanly do it. Once that backslash is escaped in
that string, you're pretty much hosed.

I think gsub is your best option here. Though, I'd love to to surprised. (:

Apologies,
-Harold