Strings

So that's numbers... but what about letters? Words? Text?

The word we use for groups of letters is string. Here are some strings:

• "Hello."
• "Ruby rocks."
• "5 is my favorite number... what's yours?"
• "Snoopy says #%^?&*@!"

Some things you can do with strings

Ruby lets you do several nifty things with strings.

Here is a good way to remember this: '"hi " * 3' is the same as '"hi " + "hi " + "hi "' so it gives me "hi hi hi ".

Notice what happens if I forget the space in "hi ":

Now see what happens here:

When Ruby sees "1" it sees a string, not a number.

More things you can do with text

Here are some more nifty things you can do with text:

Exercises

1. What do you expect this will do:

   >> 'hello'.length + 'world'.length
   

   Try it.

2. Play around with strings for a bit.