Impatient? Skip to the answer.

I recently started piping customer-created-content into my Ruby application and sometimes people wanna use an apostrophe. Usually, the apostrophe ends up being a single quote and when I threw that into ImageMagick (via the mini_magick gem) the application would barf everywhere. The culprit is that MiniMagick was not sanitizing all of my strings in the way I hoped it would.

Specifically I'm using something like:

image.draw "text 0,0 '#{ some_user_var }'"

Assuming some_user_var = "I 'love' quotes!" MiniMagick turns around and executes on the command line:

mogrify -draw text 0,0, 'I 'love' quotes!'

See the problem? Gotta escape those single quotes inside the other single quotes.

Answer!

Stack Overflow says: yourString.gsub( "'", "\\\\'" )

That'll work. If you wanna know why, continue.

Why?

If you're familiar with RegEx matching and replacing you probably know that you can output a captured group in your replace with special syntax. I can't tell you exactly what \' is supposed to output, but it seems to contain everything in the string after the first match.

In any case, first you have to escape \' so you get \\'. Next you have to escape your escape character (\) so you have \\. Finally, combine the two, and you get \\\\'.

My head hurts.