Learn Ruby The Hard Way Chapter 9 Triple Quotes

Question

Zed Shaw's Learn Ruby the Hard Way chapter 9 uses triple double quotes:

puts """
There's something going on here.
With the three double-quotes.
We'll be able to type as much as we like.
Even 4 lines if we want, or 5, or 6.
"""

I tried writing the same thing with single double quotes and it seems to work fine. I don't understand the difference between triple and single double quotes. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

I don't know why he uses triple double quotes in his book. They're nothing special, and one double quote works just fine.

This is a little known "feature" of ruby - it simply glues adjacent strings together.

s = "hello " "world" # equivalent to "hello " + "world"
s # => "hello world"

So your example is equivalent to

puts "" + "
There's something going on here.
With the three double-quotes.
We'll be able to type as much as we like.
Even 4 lines if we want, or 5, or 6.
" + ""

More string tricks: http://pivotallabs.com/stupid-ruby-quoting-tricks/

Answer 2

I think you found a mistake in the book - the reason he uses triple quotes may be that Python allows you to write strings over multiple lines only when using triple quotes, so it might have been that he took over the example from "Learning Python the Hard Way" or simply mixed up languages.

In Ruby, you can include new lines even in single quotes.

Let him know about that, I'm sure he'll appreciate it.