Ruby single and double quotes

Question

I\'ve recently been coding in Ruby and have come from Python, where single and double quotes made no difference to how the code worked as far as I know.

I moved to R

Answer 1

In Ruby, double quotes are interpolated, meaning the code in #{} is evaluated as Ruby. Single quotes are treated as literals (meaning the code isn't evaluated).

var = "hello"
"#{var} world" #=> "hello world"
'#{var} world' #=> "#{var} world"

For some extra-special magic, Ruby also offers another way to create strings:

%Q() # behaves like double quotes
%q() # behaves like single quotes

For example:

%Q(#{var} world) #=> "hello world"
%q(#{var} world) #=> "#{var} world"