Ruby Strings Concatenation

Ruby deals with strings as well as numerical data. A string may be double-quoted ("...") or single-quoted ('...').

ruby> "abc"
   "abc"
ruby> 'abc'
   "abc"

Double- and single-quoting have different effects in some cases. A double-quoted string allows character escapes by a leading backslash, and the evaluation of embedded expressions using #{}. A single-quoted string does not do this interpreting; what you see is what you get. Examples:

ruby> puts "a\nb\nc"
a
b
c
   nil
ruby> puts 'a\nb\n'
a\nb\nc
   nil
ruby> "\n"
   "\n"
ruby> '\n'
   "\\n"
ruby> "\001"
   "\001"
ruby> '\001'
   "\\001"
ruby> "abcd #{5*3} efg"
   "abcd 15 efg"
ruby> var = " abc "
   " abc "
ruby> "1234#{var}5678"
   "1234 abc 5678"

Ruby's string handling is smarter and more intuitive than C's. For instance, you can concatenate strings with +, and repeat a string many times with *:

ruby> "foo" + "bar"
   "foobar"
ruby> "foo" * 2
   "foofoo"

More at http://www.rubyist.net/~slagell/ruby/strings.html