Regexp riddle; escaping escapes

Ruby
1

Rubies:

Someone didn’t escape their & in their HTML correctly. Let’s fix it.

This regexp correctly does not escape &dude, because we only want to
escape
raw & markers:

p “yo &dude”.gsub(/&([^a-z])/i, ‘&\1’)

That passed “yo &dude” thru unchanged. (I am aware “dude” has no ; on
the
end; we are leaving that optional, for whatever reason…)

Now escape & followed by a non-alphabetic character:

p “yo & dude”.gsub(/&([^a-z])/i, ‘&\1’)

That correctly provides: “yo & dude”

Now how to escape “yo && dude”? Note that the ([^a-z]) consumes the
second
&, leading to this incorrect output:

“yo && dude”

The only workaround I can think of is to run the Regexp twice:

x = “yo && dude”
2.times{ x.gsub!(/&([^a-z])/i, ‘&\1’) }
p x

Can someone help my feeb Regexp skills and get a “yo && dude” in
one
line?

2

On 8/17/07, Phlip [email protected] wrote:

end; we are leaving that optional, for whatever reason…)
“yo && dude”

The only workaround I can think of is to run the Regexp twice:

x = “yo && dude”
2.times{ x.gsub!(/&([^a-z])/i, ‘&\1’) }
p x

Can someone help my feeb Regexp skills and get a “yo && dude” in one
line?

str = “yo && dude”
str.gsub!( %r/&(?=[^a-z])/i, ‘&’)
p str
=> “yo && dude”

The regular expression trick here is the (?=re) That’s called the
“zero-width positive lookahead”. It matches, but it does not consume
the string; so the gsub! will only replace the characters that are NOT
inside (?=re).

Blessings,
TwP

3

Tim P. wrote:

str.gsub!( %r/&(?=[^a-z])/i, ‘&’)

Thanks!

“zero-width positive lookahead”

Man, that was right there, but I was blocking on it. (-;

4

On 8/17/07, Phlip [email protected] wrote:

Tim P. wrote:

str.gsub!( %r/&(?=[^a-z])/i, ‘&’)

Thanks!

“zero-width positive lookahead”

Man, that was right there, but I was blocking on it. (-;

I had to pull my pickaxe off the shelf and look it up, too. Page 327
in the second edition if you’re interested in reading about it. It’s
in the first edition, too, that is available online.

Blessings,
TwP