Backslashes in single quoted strings vs. double quoted strings

Question

If I add a backslash+space to the start of double and single quoted strings, I get different results:

\"\\ text\"
\'\\ text\' 

In the outpu

Answer 1

Is this because the '\ ' is interpreted as a special character in the double quote string but in the single quoted string the characters are preserved as is?

Yes. Single-quoted strings are treated as literals; double-quoted strings are interpolated. This is the same in other Ruby-like languages, and hasn't changed in 1.9.