Ruby -- looking for some sort of "Regexp unescape" method
- by RubyNoobie
I have a bunch of strings that appear to have been double-escaped -- eg, I have
"\\014\"\\000\"\\016smoothing\"\\011mean\"\\022color\"\\011zero@\\016"
but I want
"\014"\000"\016smoothing"\011mean"\022color"\011zero@\016"
Is there a method I can use to unescape them? I imagine that I could make a regex to remove 1 backslash from every consecutive n backslashes, but I don't have a lot of regex experience and it seems there ought to be a "more elegant" way to do it.
For example, when I puts MyString it displays the output I'd like, but I don't know how I might capture that into a variable.
Thanks!
Edited to add context: I have this class that is being used to marshal / restore some stuff, but when I restore some old strings it spits out a type error which I've determined is because they weren't -- for some inexplicable reason -- stored as base64. They instead appear to be 'double-escaped', when I need them to be 'single-escaped' to get restored.
require 'base64'
class MarshaledStuff < ActiveRecord::Base
validates_presence_of :marshaled_obj
def contents
obj = self.marshaled_obj
return Marshal.restore(Base64.decode64(obj))
end
def contents=(newcontents)
self.marshaled_obj = Base64.encode64(Marshal.dump(newcontents))
end
end
