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Ruby Basics

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Strings

1:27 with Jay McGavren

Whether it's written in Ruby or another language, almost all software needs to work with text. Programming languages represent text in the form of strings. A string is just a series of text characters. All languages let you work with strings, but Ruby makes it especially convenient.

  • A string is a series of text characters
  • A string can be surrounded by single or double-quotes.
'A string'
"Also a string"
  • Almost all characters within string surrounded by single quotes appear as they are typed: puts 'I #{represent} "characters" verbatim.'
  • Some punctuation marks within double-quoted strings are interpreted specially: puts "I make some substitutions: #{2 + 4}"

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    Whether it's written in Ruby or another language, 0:04
    almost all software needs to work with text. 0:07
    Programming languages represent text in the form of strings. 0:10
    A string is just a series of text characters. 0:14
    All languages let you work with strings, but Ruby makes it especially easy. 0:18
    Ruby provides over 170 methods you can call on strings, 0:23
    which do things like splitting them into pieces, capitalizing them, and more. 0:27
    In this course though, we'll focus on just a few simple operations, 0:31
    including joining strings together and adding data into the middle of the string. 0:35
    A string is just a series of text characters. 0:41
    A handy way to visualize is to picture a banner that you might hang at a party 0:44
    that is stringing together individual characters. 0:48
    They can be surrounded by single or double quotes. 0:51
    Almost all characters within a string that's surrounded by single quotes 0:54
    appear exactly as they're typed. 0:57
    So you can see this single quoted string here, 0:59
    which contains a bunch of special characters. 1:02
    And you can see that those special characters appear exactly as 1:04
    is down on the output. 1:07
    Some punctuation marks within double-quoted strings are interpreted 1:09
    specially though. 1:13
    This double-quoted string has a special marker within it, 1:14
    that includes the expression 2 + 4, and 1:18
    you can see that 2 + 4 has been replaced by the result 6, down here in the output. 1:20
    We'll talk more about this in 1:26

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