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Strings

1:27 with Jay McGavren

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}"
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    [MUSIC]

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    Whether it's written in Ruby or another language,

  • 0:07

    almost all software needs to work with text.

  • 0:10

    Programming languages represent text in the form of strings.

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    A string is just a series of text characters.

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    All languages let you work with strings, but Ruby makes it especially easy.

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    Ruby provides over 170 methods you can call on strings,

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    which do things like splitting them into pieces, capitalizing them, and more.

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    In this course though, we'll focus on just a few simple operations,

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    including joining strings together and adding data into the middle of the string.

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    A string is just a series of text characters.

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    A handy way to visualize is to picture a banner that you might hang at a party

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    that is stringing together individual characters.

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    They can be surrounded by single or double quotes.

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    Almost all characters within a string that's surrounded by single quotes

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    appear exactly as they're typed.

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    So you can see this single quoted string here,

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    which contains a bunch of special characters.

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    And you can see that those special characters appear exactly as

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    is down on the output.

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    Some punctuation marks within double-quoted strings are interpreted

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    specially though.

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    This double-quoted string has a special marker within it,

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    that includes the expression 2 + 4, and

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    you can see that 2 + 4 has been replaced by the result 6, down here in the output.

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    We'll talk more about this in

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