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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

The original SMBC specifies that everything except the nouns should be nurbled; your implementations replace the nouns themselves.

I'd like to refactor the Ruby example, but I'd like to know what the proper implementation should be!

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You are correct. I've updated the gists and text accordingly.

The Ruby example was already correct.

The inevitable ruby style niggling, feel free to ignore: personally I like something a little more concise and inlined, some parts seem to have used more verbose idioms, (like Regexp.new instead of a literal), and also I think you need to escape the backreferences or use single quotes, something like:

  (words - @@nouns).each do |w|
      text.gsub!(/(\b)#{w}(\b)/i, '\1<span class="nurble">nurble</span>\2')
  end

EDIT: oops, backslash. Also, in the example, line 19, where you have 'sub', don't you mean 'pattern'?

I submitted this article expecting to learn a few things about my style. In this case, I didn't actually know you could interpolate into regexes like that, so thanks!

And thanks for the typo catch, too.

No problem, in ruby style is always pretty subjective since there's a thousand ways to do just about everything.

And, just FYI you do need to escape the backrefs or use single quotes, like:

  "\\1<span class=\"nurble\">nurble</span>\\2"

I take it back - I had issues with escaping on irb but not in the app itself. Something new to learn...

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