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Ruby Ruby Foundations Blocks Examples

Nicholas Lee
Nicholas Lee
12,474 Points
Posted by Nicholas Lee
Nicholas Lee
12,474 Points

What does \t and \n\n do in the benchmarker example?

class SimpleBenchmarker
    def self.go(how_many=1, &block)
        puts "----------Benchmarking started----------"
        start_time = Time.now
        puts "Start Time:\t#{start_time}\n\n"
        how_many.times do |a|
            print "."
            block.call
        end
        print "\n\n"
        end_time = Time.now
        puts "End Time:\t#{end_time}"
        puts "----------Benchmarking finished----------\n\n"
        puts "Result:\t\t#{end_time - start_time} seconds"
        end
    end

    SimpleBenchmarker.go 5 do
        time = rand(0.1..1.0)
        sleep time
    end

1 Answer

Stephen Goeddel
Stephen Goeddel
11,239 Points
Stephen Goeddel
Stephen Goeddel
11,239 Points

\t means tab character, and \n means new line. so \n\n would be two newlines in a row. (Hint: just like hitting enter twice in your text editor.)

Joe Cochran
Joe Cochran
4,430 Points

Stephen is correct, but on a higher level, Jason is using this to add white space to make the output more readable. Try running the code without these, and you will see that its kind of a big block of text that isn't very nice to look at.