How do I unescape c-style escape sequences from ruby?

Question

In ruby, how do I decode c-style escape sequences? e.g. '\n' to a newline, '\t' to a tab?

Answer 1

Shorter, even more hacky and fairly dangerous, due to eval:

eval "\"#{string}\""

A simple example:

> a = '1\t2\n3'
> puts a
1\t2\n3
> puts eval "\"#{a}\""
1       2
3