rubytarball.tar.gz

Do you want to be an interpreted language geek? Are you tired of getting entangled in the dense syntaxes? Does it irritate you to compile your code to machine language first? Are you looking for an easy-to-use scripting language? Well, Ruby is the best pick for you then!

Ruby is a smart, easy-to-use, functional, Object-Oriented programming language, which comes as a wondrous mix of Perl's scripting power, Pythonic capabilities and much more! As Matsumoto, creator of Ruby, implies: "I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language."

This introductory course will be providing you with hands-on practice with the support of a bunch of interactive illustrations, exercises and the integral topics of variables, built-in classes, objects, conditionals, blocks and much more!

Cool, right? Ready to dive into one of the most influential and demanding third generation programming language? Let's tune in!

Ruby: An Amateur's Pitch

You have, so far, learned that Strings are defined using single or double
quotes, like so:


And Arrays are defined using square brackets, with a comma-separated list of
objects, like so:



We'd like to quickly mention two alternative syntaxes for defining the same
objects, even though they're not used very often. However, you may sometimes
find them in other people's code, so it's useful to know they exist.

# Strings

First, Ruby has an alternative syntax for defining strings that goes like so:

`%[any-character]The actual string[the same character]`

Meaning, that when there's a percentage character `%` followed by any other
character, which also closes the whole thing, then this defines a string, too.

For example, these definitions all mean exactly the same:




p "A String"
p 'A String'
p %(A String)
p %{A String}
p %|A String|

>Which character is used to open and close the string is a matter of style and
preference. The author of this text prefers round paratheses for readability,
but others prefer curly braces or pipes. There's no very clear convention in
the Ruby community.

$$$$
## When would you use this alternative syntax?

Sometimes you need to define a string that itself contains (or may contain, in
future versions) the same quote character that you've used to define the string.
For example, if you have a string that contains the string `"Name"`, including
the quotes, but in the same string you'd also like to use
[String Interpolation](https://www.educative.io/collection/page/5642554087309312/5635220564869120/5652720409116672), so you'd normally
use double quotes to define the string. In that case, you'd need to escape the
double quotes that are contained in your string.

It probably helps to look at an example. Imagine you're working on an
application that asks the user for an email address, validates the format of
the given address, and then displays an error message if the format looks
invalid:

```
The given email address "ruby@monstas" does not look like a valid email address.
```

Using double quotes your code might look like this:





Gather some alternative syntax that can be used for strings and arrays!

Alternative Syntax

Strings