title: Escape double and single backslashes in a string in Ruby
body: <p>I'm trying to access a network path in my ruby script on a windows platform in a format like this.</p>
  
  <pre><code>\\servername\some windows share\folder 1\folder2\
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now If I try to use this as a path, it won't work. Single backslashes are not properly escaped for this script.</p>
  
  <pre><code>path = "\\servername\some windows share\folder 1\folder2\"
  d = Dir.new(path)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried everything I could think of to properly escape slashes in the path. However I can't escape that single backslash - because of it's special meaning. I tried single quotes, double quotes, escaping backslash itself, using alternate quotes such as %Q{} or %q{}, using ascii to char conversion. Nothing works in a sense that I'm not doing it right. :-) Right now the temp solution is to Map a network drive N:\ pointing to that path and access it that way, but that not a solution.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have any idea how to properly escape single backslashes?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you</p>