[cesarb]

> but it had to do with the fact that the unpronounceable symbols ^ and $ had a specific meaning that was not what the devs expected.

What's worse is that ^ and $ have different meanings depending on whether you're using "single-line" or "multi-line" mode. From a quick web search, it seems Ruby always uses "multi-line" mode, while most other languages use "single-line" mode by default and have a flag to switch to "multi-line" mode. Someone who learned regex in other languages might not notice this difference, since most of the time the text being matched has no newlines, and so expect ^ and $ to match the boundaries of the text unless told otherwise by a "multi-line" flag.