Which style of Ruby string quoting do you favour?

Question

Which style of Ruby string quoting do you favour? Up until now I\'ve always used \'single quotes\' unless the string contains certain escape sequences or interp

Answer 1

Don't use double quotes if you have to escape them. And don't fall in "single vs double quotes" trap. Ruby has excellent support for arbitrary delimiters for string literals:

Mirror of Site - https://web.archive.org/web/20160310224440/http://rors.org/2008/10/26/dont-escape-in-strings

Original Site - http://rors.org/2008/10/26/dont-escape-in-strings

Answer 2

I use single quotes unless I need interpolation, or the string contains single quotes.

However, I just learned the arbitrary delimiter trick from Dejan's answer, and I think it's great. =)

Answer 3

I see arguments for both:

For using mostly double quotes:

• The github ruby style guideline advocates always using double quotes:

• It's easier to search for a string foobar by searching for "foobar" if you were consistent with quoting. However, I'm not. So I search for ['"]foobar['"] turning on regexps.

For using some combination of single double quotes:

• Know if you need to look for string interpolation.
• Might be slightly faster (although so slight it wasn't enough to affect the github style guide).

Answer 4

I usually use double quotes unless I specifically need to disable escaping/interpolation.

Answer 5

I use single quotes unless I need interpolation. The argument about it being troublesome to change later when you need interpolation swings in the other direction, too: You have to change from double to single when you found that there was a # or a \ in your string that caused an escape you didn't intend.

The advantage of defaulting to single quotes is that, in a codebase which adopts this convention, the quote type acts as a visual cue as to whether to expect interpolated expressions or not. This is even more pronounced when your editor or IDE highlights the two string types differently.

I use %{.....} syntax for multi-line strings.

Answer 6

I used to use single quotes until I knew I needed interpolation. Then I found that I was wasting a lot of time when I'd go back and have to change some single-quotes to double-quotes. Performance testing showed no measurable speed impact of using double-quotes, so I advocate always using double-quotes.

The only exception is when using sub/gsub with back-references in the replacement string. Then you should use single quotes, since it's simpler.

mystring.gsub( /(fo+)bar/, '\1baz' )
mystring.gsub( /(fo+)bar/, "\\1baz" )