Regexp.escape not escaping forward slashes?

Question

In IRB if I pass a string like "/domain/path" to Regexp.escape it just returns it the same. I thought that forward slashes are supposed to be escaped with a backslash? Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

No, forward slashes do not need escaping. Backslashes need to be escaped (by another one),

e.g. test\test -> test\\test

Answer 2

Also, the only reason why you would need to escape / characters is because it is your delimiter for the regexp, if you specify other type of delimiters (or make an instance of the Regexp class) you won't have this issue:

/^hello\/world$/  # escaping '/' just to say: "this is not the end"
%r"^hello/world$" # no need for escaping '/'
Regexp.new('^hello/world$') # no need for escaping '/'