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The Solution

2:12 with Jay McGavren

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"

Ruby escape sequences

  • 0:00

    Your goal was to create a simple tutorial that showed various escape sequences and

  • 0:04

    how they looked in Ruby output.

  • 0:06

    Here's my solution, it's okay if yours is slightly different, but

  • 0:09

    if you see something interesting in my code you should consider borrowing it to

  • 0:12

    improve your own program.

  • 0:16

    So for each line where I need to show what an escape sequence looks like in code,

  • 0:20

    it's a bit of a pain to have to escape the \.

  • 0:23

    So what I did was, I put those lines in single quoted strings.

  • 0:28

    That way when I put /t, it puts that literal value, /t, into the output.

  • 0:36

    Then, for lines where I need to show what the escape sequence actually looks like

  • 0:40

    in output, I put the escape sequence in double quoted strings.

  • 0:44

    That way it gets interpolated into the string and

  • 0:46

    it appears as a tab character in the output.

  • 0:50

    Same thing for the new line escape sequence.

  • 0:53

    Here I put it in a single quoted string, and down here I put it in a double quoted

  • 0:57

    string so that we wind up with an actual new line character in the output.

  • 1:01

    An alternate solution might be to put the whole string in a Ruby here document.

  • 1:06

    A here document basically gets treated as one big double quoted string.

  • 1:11

    we need to escape the backslash by putting a double backslash here, and

  • 1:14

    that will appear as a single backslash in the output.

  • 1:18

    Then on the following line when we need to show what \t looks like in output, we just

  • 1:22

    put the escape sequence \t and that will be replaced with the tab character.

  • 1:28

    Same thing for the new lines,

  • 1:29

    we use a \\n to make a backslash followed by n to appear in the output.

  • 1:35

    And we actually don't have to use an escape sequence since we're using

  • 1:39

    a Here Document.

  • 1:40

    Here Documents are meant for showing output that flows over multiple lines.

  • 1:43

    So we just put a literal new line character in our code, and

  • 1:46

    that will show up in the output.

  • 1:49

    Either way you chose to solve this problem,

  • 1:51

    I hope you got in some good Ruby practice.

  • 1:53

    Feel free to add on to your finished program if you want.

  • 1:57

    For example, you might experiment with some additional Ruby escape sequences.

  • 2:01

    I'll have a link to more information about those in the teacher's notes.

  • 2:05

    You could try including single quotes in a single quoted string,

  • 2:07

    double quotes in a double quoted string, or backslashes in any string, have fun.

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