Hi all,


I have a list of states and want to xtract only the names without "(12345)"
Some states do have the paranethese with the number, some do not, like 
this:

Illinois (3762)
Indiana
Iowa (64)
Kansas
Kentucky (2675)

This is probably not the easiest way to solve this:
file.gets=~/(.+?)( \(.+)?$/
puts $1

How can I make it easier?



And please show me how I can easily substitute a single quotation mark by a 
backslash and single qotation mark to write it safely into a database.....
Finally I got this one, but it's damn ugly: .gsub("'") { "\\'" }
Because \' is a special character combination and I don't know how to 
escape it... \\' doesn't work



thanks!
Dominik