Is it possible to redefine (temporarily) the meaning of \b in RegExp situations? Here's the scenario: I've got some data that looks something like, "ABCD.E", which I stuff into an array as I encounter each new instance. Eventually, I will join(", ") these together having surrounded each of them with single quotes, for use in an SQL "IN (...)" clause. At first, I tried doing this with gsub(/\b/, "'"), but found out the hard way that the period was wreaking havoc with my intended results, and I got this: 'ABCD'.'E' instead. My next attempt was to do it by hand, like this: gsub(/^/, "'").gsub(/ $/, "'"). This worked, but seems a bit like a hack. So my question is whether there's any way to temporarily declare that a period is NOT to be considered a word boundary. Thanks, in advance, jmb-d