On Jun 16, 9:06 pm, jmb-d <jon.budardan... / gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to redefine (temporarily) the meaning of \b in RegExp
> situations?

I think the only way to do this would be to redefine all the
circumstances in which a \b could occur yourself. For instance the 6
cases that I can think of are: ^\w, \W\w, \s\w, \w$,  \w\W, \w\s. This
is a pain as you can see here I've done four and it's very ugly:

>"ABCD.E foo FG.HI".gsub(/^(\w)/, "'\\1").gsub(/(\w)$/, "\\1'").gsub(/(\w)(\s)/, "\\1'\\2").gsub(/(\s)(\w)/, "\\1'\\2")
=> "'ABCD.E' 'foo' 'FG.HI'"


Alternatively you could pre and post process by replacing "." with
something that doesn't break the boundary "zyzyzy" and then replace
back with "." when you're done inserting the ticks:
> "ABCD.E foo FG.HI".gsub(/\./, "zyzyzy").gsub(/\b/, "'").gsub(/zyzyzy/, ".")
=> "'ABCD.E' 'foo' 'FG.HI'"


Neither are very nice solutions.

- Byron
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