Andreas Schwarz wrote:

> I wanted to do a simple string substitution, and was surprised to see
> that there isn't such a method in ruby. I can't use String::(g)sub,
> because the substitution mustn't be influenced by special chars or
> backreferences in the pattern and replacement strings. Of course I could
> write functions to escape regex special chars in the pattern and
> backreferences in the replacement string, but this is about the ugliest
> solution I can think of.

There's a subliminate message here...

irb(main):006:0> a = "dave"
=> "dave"
irb(main):007:0> a["av"] = "onat"
=> "onat"
irb(main):008:0> a
=> "donate"