I am trying to find a way of removing escaped characters in input
strings from a file made by another program. That is to say,
two-character sequences in which the first character is a backslash.
I would have thought in my naivete that gsub(/\./,"") would do this,
but no. I am using Ruby 1.9 hence Oniguruma.
Firstly, are the strings input from a text file treated as single- or
double-quoted?
Secondly, are there alternatives to gsub?
Thirdly, are there any clear and exhaustive treatments of the
question of escaped backslashes in Ruby - in input strings in programs,
in IRB, with single-quoted strings, double-quoted strings and other
situations? I guess a multidimensional table might be useful to
determine how to escape a backslash, if it can be done at all.
Regards
John S.
