Ruby for the Newbie

Let's say you don't want to write puts on each line when writing your text to the screen. There are a few options for this:

print "I like hamburgers. nThey are good" # sorry, I'm hungry

The above code would display:

  I like hamburgers.

  They are good.

The n tells the program to skip to the next line. You can also use the <<Whatever document.

<Note: You don't have to use the word Whatever; any word is acceptable>

print <<WHATEVER

I like hamburgers.

They are good.

WHATEVER

This would result in the same text as our previous example:

  I like hamburgers.

  They are good.

In addition to typing in the quotes (" ") yourself, you can let Ruby add them for you. For single quotes use %q, for double quotes use %Q.

puts %Q/I like apples/

puts %q/Me too/

The above code would display the following text:

  "I like apples"

  'Me too'

You can also concatenate (or join together) strings very simply in Ruby, using the + symbol.

puts "Come over here" + "now"

Would print out: "Come over here now."