On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:17 PM, Brian Candler <b.candler / pobox.com> wrote:
>>> RUBY_DESCRIPTION
> => "ruby 1.9.2dev (2009-07-18 trunk 24186) [i686-linux]"
>>> a = "gro123 er"
> => "gro¡¬ 123 er"
>>> a.encoding
> => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
>>> a =~ /(\d+)/
> => 5
>>> $1
> => "123"
>>> a =~ /(\w+)/
> => 0
>>> $1
> => "gro¡¬"

i think you caught the last one,

> RUBY_DESCRIPTION
=> "ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-05-31 revision 28117) [i686-linux]"
> a = "gro¡¬ 123 er"
=> "gro¡¬ 123 er"
> a.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
>  a =~ /(\w+)/
=> 0
> $1
=> "gro"
> $'
=> "¡¬ 123 er"

kind regards -botp