Clarification on the Ruby << Operator

Question

I am quite new to Ruby and am wondering about the << operator. When I googled this operator, it says that it is a Binary Left Shift Operator given this ex

Answer 1

In Ruby, operators are just methods. Depending on the class of your variable, << can do different things:

# For integers it means bitwise left shift:
5 << 1  # gives 10
17 << 3 # gives 136

# arrays and strings, it means append:
"hello, " << "world"   # gives "hello, world"
[1, 2, 3] << 4         # gives [1, 2, 3, 4]

It all depends on what the class defines << to be.