Improper gsub replacement

Question

I am trying to replace all alphanumeric characters of an email with the '#' character using the gsub method but Ruby is inserting a backslash before the '@' character.

E.g:

"[email protected]".gsub(/[a-z0-9]/, "#") returns "###\#@###.###" instead of "####@###.###".

Answer 1

It returns "####@###.###" as expected, try to:

puts "[email protected]".gsub(/[a-z0-9]/, "#")

What you see in IRB/Pry is the prevention of #@ being interpreted as string interpolation.

Please also refer to very valuable comment by @Stefan below.