Question

I’m trying to pattern match the following and substitute “c” for both a left and right parenthesis.

Example:
string = “(a,b)”

So I want the string to come out like “ca,cb” after I call string.sub(//,"c") on it. I’ve tried string.sub(/[()]/,"c"), but that only results in “ca,b)”. How do I pattern match the left AND right parenthesis?

Answer 1

ruby-1.9.3-p125 :001 > string = "(a,b)"
 => "(a,b)" 
ruby-1.9.3-p125 :002 > string.gsub(/[()]/, "c")
 => "ca,bc" 

Note the gsub: sub makes a single substitution; gsub (“global sub”) substitutes as many as it can.