Escape double and single backslashes in a string in Ruby

ruby-on-rails ruby escaping backslash
konung picture konung · May 5, 2010 · Viewed 28.8k times · Source

I'm trying to access a network path in my ruby script on a windows platform in a format like this.

\\servername\some windows share\folder 1\folder2\

Now If I try to use this as a path, it won't work. Single backslashes are not properly escaped for this script.

path = "\\servername\some windows share\folder 1\folder2\"
d = Dir.new(path)

I tried everything I could think of to properly escape slashes in the path. However I can't escape that single backslash - because of it's special meaning. I tried single quotes, double quotes, escaping backslash itself, using alternate quotes such as %Q{} or %q{}, using ascii to char conversion. Nothing works in a sense that I'm not doing it right. :-) Right now the temp solution is to Map a network drive N:\ pointing to that path and access it that way, but that not a solution.

Does anyone have any idea how to properly escape single backslashes?

Thank you

Answer

John Douthat picture John Douthat · May 5, 2010

Just double-up every backslash, like so:

"\\\\servername\\some windows share\\folder 1\\folder2\\"

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