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Ruby Ruby Basics (Retired) Ruby Strings What are Strings?

Interpolation

when using the %Q syntax at the beginning of a new line code, can it replace the first line name = gets or its just some more fancy option of writing the line 2 code without having to type "Hello #{name}!"

1 Answer

The %Q format can be traced back to the days of Perl scripts. Here's a good discussion of it on StackOverflow.

While it doesn't replace the "name = gets", you can use them together like this:

name = gets
puts %Q(Hello #{name})

The benefit of this type of string formatting is that you don't have to escape characters like / \ " ' to include them in the string:

chars = %Q(\/\"'"')

will give you the literal string \/\"'"' which is useful if you have a string that contains a lot of these potentially headache inducing characters.