Watch out! This tutorial is over 8 years old. Please keep this in mind as some code snippets provided may no longer work or need modification to work on current systems.
Ruby has many ways of making strings, which are generally variations of the many ways Perl has of making strings. Double quotes allow values to be interpolated into the string, while single quotes do not. Most escapes are treated literally in single quotes, including the fact that \n is treated as two characters, a backward slash followed by an n.