Gsub producing different results running the same code

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@david

So $1 will be leftover from some previous regex task.

OMG. Thank you. I thought I was going crazy.

@david

My preference would be to pass a block to gsub. The block is evaluated after the regex has been matched, so $1 will work as you expect

Brilliant.

@david

Or you can use the ‘backreference’ feature of gsub.

I’d always wondered about those backslashes. Five years later, I get it.

This totally was a stack exchange question.

A million thanks.