escaping a string in Ruby

Question

I want to insert the following as the value for a variable in some Ruby:

`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:";'<>?,./

Surrounding this in double quotes doesn't work, so is there a nice escape_until_the_end sort of thing available?

Answer 1

Don't use multiple methods - keep it simple.

Escape the #, the backslash, and the double-quote.

irb(main):001:0> foo = "`~!@\#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\\:\";'<>?,./"
=> "`~!@\#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\\:\";'<>?,./"

Or if you don't want to escape the # (the substitution character for variables in double-quoted strings), use and escape single quotes instead:

irb(main):002:0> foo = '`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\\:";\'<>?,./'
=> "`~!@\#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\\:\";'<>?,./"

%q is great for lots of other strings that don't contain every ascii punctuation character. :)

%q(text without parens)
%q{text without braces}
%Q[text without brackets with #{foo} substitution]

Edit: Evidently you can used balanced parens inside %q() successfully as well, but I would think that's slightly dangerous from a maintenance standpoint, as there's no semantics there to imply that you're always going to necessarily balance your parens in a string.

Answer 2

First, unless I'm crazy %q() does work here, perfectly well, since the inner parentheses are balanced:

>> weird = %q(`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:";'<>?,./)
=> "`~!@\#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\\:";'<>?,./"
>> puts weird
`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:";'<>?,./

As a side note: when using %q , you always have the nuclear option of using spaces as the delimiter. This is foul and officially a Bad Idea, but it works.

Again, I wouldn't do it, but just to see...

>> weird = %q `~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:";'<>?,./ 
=> "`~!@\#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\\:";'<>?,./"

Answer 3

<<EOT , and %q{} are your friends. Info on using them from the Programming Ruby The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide .

Try mixing the various approaches:

%q{`~!@#$%^&*()_-+}+"{}"+%q{=|[]\\:";'<>?,./}

or alternatively, just use backslashes to escape the problematic chars:

"`~!@\#$%^&*()_-+{}=|[]\\:\";'<>?,./"

Answer 4

The first thing I'd normally think of would be a %q directive -- but since you seem to be using all the punctuation you'd normally use to delimit one, I can't think of an easy way to make it work here.

The second thing I'd think of would be a heredoc:

mystring = <<END
`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:";'<>?,./
END

That breaks after the backslash, though.

So my third answer, clunky but the best thing I can think of with just two minutes' thought, would be to substitute something harmless for the "problem" characters and then substitute it after the assignment:

mystring = '`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:"; <>?,./'.tr(" ","'")

I don't like it, but it works.