Question

why this snippet:

'He said "Hello"' =~ /(\w)\1/

matches "ll"? I thought that the \w part matches "H", and hence \1 refers to "H", thus nothing should be matched? but why this result?

Answer 1

I thought that the \w part matches “H”

\w matches any alphanumerical character (and underscore). It also happens to match H but that’s not terribly interesting since the regular expression then goes on to say that this has to be matched twice – which H can’t in your text (since it doesn’t appear twice consecutively), and neither is any of the other characters, just l. So the regular expression matches ll.