What is the %w “thing” in ruby?

Question

I\'m referring to the %w operator/constructor/whatever you may call it, used like this:

%w{ foo bar baz }
=> [\"foo\", \"bar\", \"baz\"]

Answer 1

Unsure about the "official" documentation but this is pretty good : http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/Syntax/Literals#The_.25_Notation

Whether you use {} [] () or <> does not matter except if your string contains this character e.g.:

%q{a closing parenthesis: ")"}

The syntax is pretty complex so remembering every variant is not very useful, but it can come in handy when you are hacking quickly and want to avoid taking care of escape characters manually.