Ruby string comparison against regex capture

Question

I'm new to ruby and it could be some basic stuff, but it just drives me crazy.

How is the following possible?

    (rdb:1) display $2
    26: $2 = "Alien"

    (rdb:1) display $2 == "Alien"
    27: $2 == "Alien" = false

    (rdb:1) display $2.equal? "Alien"
    28: $2.equal? "Alien" = false

    (rdb:1) display $2.strip.chomp.equal? "Alien"
    29: $2.strip.chomp.equal? "Alien" = false

    (rdb:1) display $2.class
    30: $2.class = String

Ruby 1.9.3p125, Rails 3.1.0, Cucumber 1.1.8

Perhaps you should use `(` and `)` just to make sure what you want to check? Ruby tries to guess (well, not the right word here) what you want to say, but using `(` makes it much clearer. — mliebelt, Mar 28 '12 at 06:11
@AndrewMarshall in ruby-debug and also while running the code itself without debugging — Grozz, Mar 28 '12 at 06:17

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '12 at 06:24

0

(rdb:1) display $2[0]
2: $2[0] = "

Mistery solved.

answered Mar 28 '12 at 06:24

Grozz

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In general, when an "obvious" string comparison fails, I look at... 1. the first character, 2. the last character, and 3. the length, to see if there are some non-printing characters in the string or other general wackyness. – Bob Gilmore Mar 28 '12 at 06:28

Ruby string comparison against regex capture

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