Strings

[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string has a special marker within it, 1:14 that includes the expression 2 + 4, and 1:18 you can see that 2 + 4 has been replaced by the result 6, down here in the output. 1:20 We'll talk more about this in 1:26