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Now that you've coded your solution to the practice problem, I'll show you how I did it.
One Solution
Here's my code:
puts 'When you include \t in a double-quoted string in Ruby, it looks like this:'
puts "before\tafter"
puts 'When you include \n in a double-quoted string, it looks like this:'
puts "before\nafter"
Additional Links
Your goal was to create a simple tutorial
that showed various escape sequences and
0:00
how they looked in Ruby output.
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Here's my solution, it's okay if
yours is slightly different, but
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if you see something interesting in my
code you should consider borrowing it to
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improve your own program.
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So for each line where I need to show what
an escape sequence looks like in code,
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it's a bit of a pain to
have to escape the \.
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So what I did was, I put those
lines in single quoted strings.
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That way when I put /t, it puts that
literal value, /t, into the output.
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Then, for lines where I need to show what
the escape sequence actually looks like
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in output, I put the escape
sequence in double quoted strings.
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That way it gets interpolated
into the string and
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it appears as a tab
character in the output.
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Same thing for
the new line escape sequence.
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Here I put it in a single quoted string,
and down here I put it in a double quoted
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string so that we wind up with an actual
new line character in the output.
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An alternate solution might be to put
the whole string in a Ruby here document.
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A here document basically gets treated
as one big double quoted string.
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we need to escape the backslash by
putting a double backslash here, and
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that will appear as a single
backslash in the output.
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Then on the following line when we need to
show what \t looks like in output, we just
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put the escape sequence \t and that
will be replaced with the tab character.
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Same thing for the new lines,
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we use a \\n to make a backslash
followed by n to appear in the output.
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And we actually don't have to use
an escape sequence since we're using
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a Here Document.
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Here Documents are meant for showing
output that flows over multiple lines.
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So we just put a literal new
line character in our code, and
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that will show up in the output.
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Either way you chose
to solve this problem,
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I hope you got in some good Ruby practice.
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Feel free to add on to your
finished program if you want.
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For example, you might experiment with
some additional Ruby escape sequences.
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I'll have a link to more information
about those in the teacher's notes.
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You could try including single
quotes in a single quoted string,
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double quotes in a double quoted string,
or backslashes in any string, have fun.
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