I have a bunch of strings that appear to have been double-escaped -- eg, I have "\\014\"\\000\"\\016smoothing\"\\011mean\"\\022color\"\\011zero@\\016" but I want "\014"\000"\016smoothing"\011mean"\022color"\011zero@\016" Is there a method I can use to unescape them? I imagine that I could make a regex to remove 1 backslash from every consecutive n backslashes, but I don't have a lot of regex experience and it seems there ought to be a "more elegant" way to do it. For example, when I puts MyString it displays the output I'd like, but I don't know how I might capture that into a variable. Thanks! Edited to add context: I have this class that is being used to marshal / restore some stuff, but when I restore some old strings it spits out a type error which I've determined is because they weren't -- for some inexplicable reason -- stored as base64. They instead appear to be 'double-escaped', when I need them to be 'single-escaped' to get restored. require 'base64' class MarshaledStuff < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :marshaled_obj def contents obj = self.marshaled_obj return Marshal.restore(Base64.decode64(obj)) end def contents=(newcontents) self.marshaled_obj = Base64.encode64(Marshal.dump(newcontents)) end end