Question

I’m working in Ruby and I’m trying to escape ' characters to \' so that I can use them in SQL. I’m trying to use gsub, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

"this doesn't work".gsub /'/, '\\'' #=> "this doesnt workt work"
"this doesn't work".gsub /'/, '\\\'' #=> "this doesnt workt work"
"this doesn't work".gsub /'/, '\\\\'' #=> "this doesn\\'t work"
"this doesn't work".gsub /'/, '\\\\\'' #=> "this doesn\\'t work"

I don’t know if gsub is even the right method to be using, so I’m willing to try almost anything that gets the results I’m looking for.

Answer 1

Someone else had this very issue, due to a special meaning/interpretation in Ruby’s regex.

\’ means $’ which is everything after
the match. Escape the \ again and it
works

See this answer.

Does this work?

"this doesn't work".gsub /'/, '\\\\\'' => "this doesn\\'t work"