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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.

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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"

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Ruby escape sequences

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Your goal was to create a simple tutorial that showed various escape sequences and 0:00

how they looked in Ruby output. 0:04

Here's my solution, it's okay if yours is slightly different, but 0:06

if you see something interesting in my code you should consider borrowing it to 0:09

improve your own program. 0:12

So for each line where I need to show what an escape sequence looks like in code, 0:16

it's a bit of a pain to have to escape the \. 0:20

So what I did was, I put those lines in single quoted strings. 0:23

That way when I put /t, it puts that literal value, /t, into the output. 0:28

Then, for lines where I need to show what the escape sequence actually looks like 0:36

in output, I put the escape sequence in double quoted strings. 0:40

That way it gets interpolated into the string and 0:44

it appears as a tab character in the output. 0:46

Same thing for the new line escape sequence. 0:50

Here I put it in a single quoted string, and down here I put it in a double quoted 0:53

string so that we wind up with an actual new line character in the output. 0:57

An alternate solution might be to put the whole string in a Ruby here document. 1:01

A here document basically gets treated as one big double quoted string. 1:06

we need to escape the backslash by putting a double backslash here, and 1:11

that will appear as a single backslash in the output. 1:14

Then on the following line when we need to show what \t looks like in output, we just 1:18

put the escape sequence \t and that will be replaced with the tab character. 1:22

Same thing for the new lines, 1:28

we use a \\n to make a backslash followed by n to appear in the output. 1:29

And we actually don't have to use an escape sequence since we're using 1:35

a Here Document. 1:39

Here Documents are meant for showing output that flows over multiple lines. 1:40

So we just put a literal new line character in our code, and 1:43

that will show up in the output. 1:46

Either way you chose to solve this problem, 1:49

I hope you got in some good Ruby practice. 1:51

Feel free to add on to your finished program if you want. 1:53

For example, you might experiment with some additional Ruby escape sequences. 1:57

I'll have a link to more information about those in the teacher's notes. 2:01

You could try including single quotes in a single quoted string, 2:05

double quotes in a double quoted string, or backslashes in any string, have fun. 2:07

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