On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 07:21:51 +0900
"Ron Coutts" <rcoutts / envistatech.com> wrote:

> I'm having trouble with backslashes and I don't know what is wrong.  I
> can't seem to write and expression that will evaluate to a string
> containing a single backslash character as in "\".  It seems that "\\"
> in Ruby evaluates to "\\" not to "\" as I would expect.  Below are a few
> things I've tried.  If anyone could send back a quick answer it would be
> much appreciated.

In any ruby string literal, backslash escapes the next character.
This is so you can write:

    puts "\"hello world\""  # => "hello world"

It escapes itself, too, so you have a way of printing backslashes:

    puts "\\"               # => \

It works inside single quotes, so you can escape single quotes:

    puts '\''               # => '

That means it needs to escape itself as well, otherwise you couldn't
print a backslash:

    puts '\\'               # => \

This also works inside docstrings.

hth,

-- 
Ryan Pavlik <rpav / mephle.com>

"*More* hapless visitors? Tsk, and I'm all out of doom quests." - 8BT