2010/4/22 Nathaniel Madura <>:
> I am getting a string that has escape sequences in it, and I would like
> to print it to the screen after reprocessing the escape sequences. Maybe
> I have missed something obvious but I haven't seen anything in the docs
> that suggest how to do this. To replicate the behaviour I create a
> string in irb like so:
>
> $ irb
>>> str =3D 'some \n\r string \t with \r escape \n sequences'
> =3D> "some \\n\\r string \\t with \\r escape \\n sequences"
>>> eval "puts str"
> some \n\r string \t with \r escape \n sequences
> =3D> nil
If you use eval you rather need to do something like this
irb(main):004:0> str =3D 'some \n\r string \t with \r escape \n sequences'
=3D> "some \\n\\r string \\t with \\r escape \\n sequences"
irb(main):005:0> puts eval('"'+str+'"')
some
escape with
sequences
=3D> nil
irb(main):006:0>
>>> puts "%s" % str
> some \n\r string \t with \r escape \n sequences
> =3D> nil
>
> I recognize that I can simply do a gsub:
>
>>> puts str.gsub(/\\n/, "\n")
> some
> \r string \t with \r escape
> =A0sequences
> =3D> nil
>
> but that would mean I would have to pattern match all sequences, and it
> seems like there should be a better way
Actually doing a replacement would probably be my preferred way
because of the security implications of eval.
You can do it in one go
irb(main):008:0> PAT =3D {'n'=3D>"\n",'t'=3D>"\t",'r'=3D>"\r"}
=3D> {"n"=3D>"\n", "t"=3D>"\t", "r"=3D>"\r"}
irb(main):009:0> str.gsub(/\\(.)/){|m| PAT[$1]}
=3D> "some \n\r string \t with \r escape \n sequences"
Kind regards
robert
--=20
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/
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