Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3Letters

We’ve learned all about numbers, but what about letters? Words? Text?

We refer to groups of letters in a program as strings. (You can think of beads with letters on them being strung together.) To make it easier to see just what part of the code is in a string, I’ll color strings 'like this'. Here are some strings:

'Hello.'
'Ruby rocks.'
'Nobody deserves a mime, Buffy.'
'Snoopy says #%^?&*@! when he stubs his toe.'
'     '
''

As you can see, strings can have punctuation, digits, symbols, and spaces in them…more than just letters. That last string doesn’t have anything in it at all; we call that an empty string.

We used puts to print numbers; let’s try it with some strings:

puts 'Hello, world!'
puts ''
puts 'Good-bye.' ...