I recently realized that if you juxtapose a sequence of Ruby string literals (e.g. \'a\' \"b\" \'c\'), it\'s equivalent to the concatenation of those string lit
This is now officially documented in the RDoc that ships with Ruby.
Changes will propagate to RubyDoc the next time they build the documentation.
The added documentation:
Adjacent string literals are automatically concatenated by the interpreter:
"con" "cat" "en" "at" "ion" #=> "concatenation"
"This string contains "\
"no newlines." #=> "This string contains no newlines."
Any combination of adjacent single-quote, double-quote, percent strings will
be concatenated as long as a percent-string is not last.
%q{a} 'b' "c" #=> "abc"
"a" 'b' %q{c} #=> NameError: uninitialized constant q
Right now, this isn't anywhere in the official ruby documentation, but I think it should be. As pointed out in a comment, the logical place for the docs to go would be: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/doc/syntax/literals_rdoc.html#label-Strings
I've opened a pull request on ruby/ruby with the documentation added.
If this pull request is merged, it will automatically update http://www.ruby-doc.org. I'll update this post if/when that happens. ^_^
The only other mentions of this I've found online are: