Why are exclamation marks used in Ruby methods?

Question

In Ruby some methods have a question mark (?) that ask a question like include? that ask if the object in question is included, this then returns a

Answer 1

Bottom line: ! methods just change the value of the object they are called upon, whereas a method without ! returns a manipulated value without writing over the object the method was called upon.

Only use ! if you do not plan on needing the original value stored at the variable you called the method on.

I prefer to do something like:

foo = "word"
bar = foo.capitalize
puts bar

OR

foo = "word"
puts foo.capitalize

Instead of

foo = "word"
foo.capitalize!
puts foo

Just in case I would like to access the original value again.