actor.biography now needs to_s for match variables

[wuffo]

Love the plugin.

Previously, without the plugin, I could do a match or sub on biography directly and the special variables ($1, $&, etc.) would be created. With the plugin, I need to append to_s to biography or else all such variables will be nil - even if the matching succeeds. From the console:

>> actor.biography.match(/(.)/)[0]
actor.biography.match(/(.)/)[0]
=> "H"
>> $1
$1
=> nil
>> actor.biography.to_s.match(/(.)/)[0]
actor.biography.to_s.match(/(.)/)[0]
=> "H"
>> $1
$1
=> "H"


Why does this happen? Can I patch the plugin somehow so that I don't need to_s everywhere?

Thanks.

[ramsingla]

Very interesting observation. The reason of this is because of scope. According to http://www.rubyist.net/~slagell/ruby/globalvars.html. $~ and $_ have local scope even though they seem to be global variables. There is no way in my opinion to populate local scoped $~ and $_ from proxy column. Because automatic local scope will be involved and it would populate the global variables but as soon as that scope closes they will vanish. This is a side-effect of the proxy column. Plus the use of global variables for matching is not very object oriented. :).