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Practice Strings in Ruby

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The Solution

2:12 with Jay McGavren

Now that you've coded your solution to the practice problem, I'll show you how I did it.

One Solution

Here's my code:

puts 'When you include \t in a double-quoted string in Ruby, it looks like this:'
puts "before\tafter"
puts 'When you include \n in a double-quoted string, it looks like this:'
puts "before\nafter"

Ruby escape sequences

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    Your goal was to create a simple tutorial that showed various escape sequences and 0:00
    how they looked in Ruby output. 0:04
    Here's my solution, it's okay if yours is slightly different, but 0:06
    if you see something interesting in my code you should consider borrowing it to 0:09
    improve your own program. 0:12
    So for each line where I need to show what an escape sequence looks like in code, 0:16
    it's a bit of a pain to have to escape the \. 0:20
    So what I did was, I put those lines in single quoted strings. 0:23
    That way when I put /t, it puts that literal value, /t, into the output. 0:28
    Then, for lines where I need to show what the escape sequence actually looks like 0:36
    in output, I put the escape sequence in double quoted strings. 0:40
    That way it gets interpolated into the string and 0:44
    it appears as a tab character in the output. 0:46
    Same thing for the new line escape sequence. 0:50
    Here I put it in a single quoted string, and down here I put it in a double quoted 0:53
    string so that we wind up with an actual new line character in the output. 0:57
    An alternate solution might be to put the whole string in a Ruby here document. 1:01
    A here document basically gets treated as one big double quoted string. 1:06
    we need to escape the backslash by putting a double backslash here, and 1:11
    that will appear as a single backslash in the output. 1:14
    Then on the following line when we need to show what \t looks like in output, we just 1:18
    put the escape sequence \t and that will be replaced with the tab character. 1:22
    Same thing for the new lines, 1:28
    we use a \\n to make a backslash followed by n to appear in the output. 1:29
    And we actually don't have to use an escape sequence since we're using 1:35
    a Here Document. 1:39
    Here Documents are meant for showing output that flows over multiple lines. 1:40
    So we just put a literal new line character in our code, and 1:43
    that will show up in the output. 1:46
    Either way you chose to solve this problem, 1:49
    I hope you got in some good Ruby practice. 1:51
    Feel free to add on to your finished program if you want. 1:53
    For example, you might experiment with some additional Ruby escape sequences. 1:57
    I'll have a link to more information about those in the teacher's notes. 2:01
    You could try including single quotes in a single quoted string, 2:05
    double quotes in a double quoted string, or backslashes in any string, have fun. 2:07

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