Working with Text

Enemy 1 of 5

Joining strings with +

Ruby strings can be joined together with the + operator, the same symbol used for adding numbers — Ruby figures out which operation to perform based on the types of the values involved. + doesn't insert a space automatically, so if you want a gap between the joined pieces, you need to include it yourself, either as its own string or trailing/leading whitespace baked into one of the parts (notice the example's greeting already ends with ", ").

Unlike PHP's dedicated . concatenation operator, Ruby reuses + for both strings and numbers, but you can't mix the two directly — trying to + a string and a number raises an error, since Ruby won't silently guess whether you meant to convert the number to text or the text to a number.