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

Single quote preserve the characters inside them. But double quotes evaluate and parse them. See the following example:

"Welcome #{@user.name} to App!" 

Results:

Welcome Bhojendra to App!

But,

'Welcome #{@user.name} to App!'

Results:

Welcome #{@user.name} to App!

Answer 2

I always use single quotes unless I need interpolation.

Why? It looks nicer. When you have a ton of stuff on the screen, lots of single quotes give you less "visual clutter" than lots of double quotes.

I'd like to note that this isn't something I deliberately decided to do, just something that I've 'evolved' over time in trying to achieve nicer looking code.

Occasionally I'll use %q or %Q if I need in-line quotes. I've only ever used heredocs maybe once or twice.

Answer 3

Like many programmers, I try to be as specific as is practical. This means that I try to make the compiler do as little work as possible by having my code as simple as possible. So for strings, I use the simplest method that suffices for my needs for that string.

<<END
For strings containing multiple newlines, 
particularly when the string is going to
be output to the screen (and thus formatting
matters), I use heredocs.
END

%q[Because I strongly dislike backslash quoting when unnecessary, I use %Q or %q
for strings containing ' or " characters (usually with square braces, because they
happen to be the easiest to type and least likely to appear in the text inside).]

"For strings needing interpretation, I use %s."%['double quotes']

'For the most common case, needing none of the above, I use single quotes.'

My first simple test of the quality of syntax highlighting provided by a program is to see how well it handles all methods of quoting.