Strings in Ruby Language

Strings are a fundamental data type in the Ruby programming language. They are used to represent and manipulate

text data, making them an essential part of any Ruby program. In this post, we’ll explore the basics of working with strings in Ruby and provide some examples to illustrate their usage.

Creating Strings

In Ruby, you can create strings using either single or double quotes. Here are a few examples:

single_quoted = 'This is a single-quoted string.'
double_quoted = "This is a double-quoted string."

Both single and double-quoted strings are equivalent in most cases, but they have some differences. Double-quoted strings allow for escape sequences and expression interpolation, which we’ll discuss shortly.

Concatenating Strings

You can concatenate strings in Ruby using the + operator or the << operator. Here’s how you can do it:

first_name = "John"
last_name = "Doe"

full_name = first_name + " " + last_name
# OR
full_name = first_name << " " << last_name

String Interpolation

String interpolation is a powerful feature in Ruby that allows you to embed expressions or variables within double-quoted strings. Here’s an example:

name = "Alice"
age = 30

message = "Hello, my name is #{name} and I am #{age} years old."

The #{} syntax is used to insert the values of the name and age variables into the string.

Common String Methods

Ruby provides a rich set of methods for working with strings. Some common methods include:

• length or size: Returns the length of the string.
• upcase and downcase: Converts the string to uppercase or lowercase.
• strip: Removes leading and trailing whitespace.
• split: Divides the string into an array of substrings based on a delimiter.
• sub and gsub: Replace the first or all occurrences of a substring with another.

Here’s an example that demonstrates some of these methods:

text = "   Hello, World!   "
length = text.length
upcased = text.upcase
downcased = text.downcase
stripped = text.strip
words = text.split(",")
replaced = text.gsub("Hello", "Hi")

puts "Original text: '#{text}'"
puts "Length: #{length}"
puts "Uppercase: '#{upcased}'"
puts "Lowercase: '#{downcased}'"
puts "Stripped: '#{stripped}'"
puts "Split into words: #{words}"
puts "Replaced: '#{replaced}'"

Escape Sequences

Ruby also supports escape sequences in double-quoted strings. These sequences are used to represent special characters, such as newline (\n) and tab (\t). Here’s an example:

escaped_string = "This is a string with a newline\nand a tab\tcharacter."