Sams Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

Strings and String Literals

The two most common ways of specifying a string are in single and double quotes, and we've been doing both ever since Day 1. Often it doesn't matter which kind of quotes you choose:

"Parks and Recreation" == 'Parks and Recreation'  #->  true

The difference arises when you want to put something unusual in the string, such as a special character or an expression that should be evaluated. We have seen that \n produces a single newline character when enclosed in double quotes. When inside single quotes, though, it produces a backslash character and an n, as if the escape sequence had no particular meaning at all:

 cooked = "a\nb\nc\n" raw = 'a\nb\nc\n' cooked.length #-> 6 raw.length #-> 9 puts cooked # output: a b c puts ...