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Whether it's written in Ruby or another language, almost all software needs to work with text. Programming languages represent text in the form of strings. A string is just a series of text characters. All languages let you work with strings, but Ruby makes it especially convenient.
- A string is a series of text characters
- A string can be surrounded by single or double-quotes.
'A string'
"Also a string"
- Almost all characters within string surrounded by single quotes appear as they are typed:
puts 'I #{represent} "characters" verbatim.' - Some punctuation marks within double-quoted strings are interpreted specially:
puts "I make some substitutions: #{2 + 4}"
[MUSIC]
0:00
Whether it's written in Ruby or
another language,
0:04
almost all software
needs to work with text.
0:07
Programming languages represent
text in the form of strings.
0:10
A string is just a series
of text characters.
0:14
All languages let you work with strings,
but Ruby makes it especially easy.
0:18
Ruby provides over 170 methods
you can call on strings,
0:23
which do things like splitting them into
pieces, capitalizing them, and more.
0:27
In this course though, we'll focus
on just a few simple operations,
0:31
including joining strings together and
adding data into the middle of the string.
0:35
A string is just a series
of text characters.
0:41
A handy way to visualize is to picture
a banner that you might hang at a party
0:44
that is stringing together
individual characters.
0:48
They can be surrounded by single or
double quotes.
0:51
Almost all characters within a string
that's surrounded by single quotes
0:54
appear exactly as they're typed.
0:57
So you can see this single
quoted string here,
0:59
which contains a bunch
of special characters.
1:02
And you can see that those special
characters appear exactly as
1:04
is down on the output.
1:07
Some punctuation marks within
double-quoted strings are interpreted
1:09
specially though.
1:13
This double-quoted string has
a special marker within it,
1:14
that includes the expression 2 + 4, and
1:18
you can see that 2 + 4 has been replaced
by the result 6, down here in the output.
1:20
We'll talk more about this in
1:26
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