change regex percent literal delimiter to singlequote

[Epigene]

Curly braces are a part of Regex syntax (.{3,}, .{,9} etc.), so if the literal contains curlybraces, I have to use some other unspecified fallback delimiters. Bikeshedding ensues. Let's use delimiters that are not a part of Regex syntax and are less likely to appear in them - singlequotes. This goes nicely with string literals using doublequotes.

[searls]

Though I don't use it myself, my understanding is that %r{} is quite common and popular, so this would be a pretty major change. Additionally, I just scanned the regexes in the app that I'm building and a full third of them contain ' characters, so this would be a pretty disruptive change AFAICT.

Would welcome other perspectives here

[benjamineskola]

As I understand it, paired brackets as delimiters don't prevent you from using the same character, unescaped, within the literal:

irb(main):001> %r{a{0,1}}
=> /a{0,1}/

Whereas unpaired characters like ' would require that all ' be escaped:

irb(main):002> %r'it\'s'
=> /it's/

So since %r{} doesn't prevent any characters being used, and %r'' would, I don't think this change would make sense; there's nothing to gain by it.

(In the worst-case scenario, a regex containing an unpaired closing } would require it to be escaped if using %r{}. But that would make it no worse than using %r'' when the regex contains a ', and in any case //-literals are a viable alternative.)

[searls]

Makes sense to me, failing a clear counter-argument. Thanks!