Single quoted Ruby strings -- inconsistent escaping

Question

Why do the following strings give me the same output in the Ruby interpreter?

  'f:\new'
  'f:\\new'

Both strings result in: "f:\\new". I was expecting the second string to display "f:\\\\new" (if not that, then the first one should have shown "f:\new")

I do not see the difference in your two input strings. Perhaps you mistyped. — murgatroid99, Jul 21 '10 at 13:33
I'm not familiar with Ruby but I guess the first is detected as an incorrect use of backslash (in a single-quote string, it should have been followed by backslash or single quote), so the backslash is preserved... — pascal, Jul 21 '10 at 13:37
@murgatroid99, do you see the difference now? (There was an SO formatting error.) — Agnel Kurian, Jul 21 '10 at 13:38
@murgatroid99 :- I edit the question now check it. @Vulcan Eager :- Please check if i correctly edit or not ? — Salil, Jul 21 '10 at 13:38
possible duplicate of [Backslashes in Single quoted strings vs. Double quoted strings in Ruby?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/648156/backslashes-in-single-quoted-strings-vs-double-quoted-strings-in-ruby). In particular, look at [this page](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/Strings#Single%5Fquotes) that was linked in the accepted answer. — mikej, Jul 21 '10 at 13:48
@Vulcan OK, sorry if I was a bit close-trigger happy :) looks like your question is a more specific version of the general question. The *reason* is the same as the one given in that question though: In a single quoted string \\ becomes \ and \' becomes '. Everything else is left alone. — mikej, Jul 21 '10 at 14:01

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 21 '10 at 13:43

2

Single-quoted strings support only two escape sequences: \' and \\

That's why in your first example \n is not treated as new-line char: it's not in the list.

answered Jul 21 '10 at 13:43

Nikita Rybak

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Single quoted Ruby strings -- inconsistent escaping

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