Question

I’m trying to do something like the following. Let’s say i have the following string:

"some string"

And i wanted to replace the space with a \1. However, wether i use single or double quote, i dont get the result:

"some string".gsub(" ", "\1") => "somestring"
"some string".gsub(" ", '\1') => "somestring"
"some string".gsub(" ", '\\1') => "somestring"

What i want is:

"some\1string"

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This is only annoying because \1 through \9 are reserved for use in substitutions.

A possible solution is:

"some string".gsub(" ", '\\\\1')

It’s kind of ugly, but it works.

An alternative is to use the block style where substitution isn’t performed:

"some string".gsub(" ") { '\1' }

Remember that the output will be "some\\1string" because backslash is represented as \\ inside a double-quoted string. If you print it out you will get a single backslash.