"I'm a string"
'I too am a string'
"usa".upcase
Here we have a string, or a line of text set off by quotation marks. Strings are always surrounded by single or double quotes. All string objects have built-in methods we can use: upcase is one. Unlike the + method we used with the numbers above, we don't have to pass any arguments along for it to work. We can just take any string and send it the upcase method as a message, and it will capitalize all the letters in the string. Try each of the following in IRB:
"USA".downcase
"mike".capitalize
"stressed".reverse
"flower".length
"hello world, this is a humble programmer speaking".split
Again, like before, each time we have a string object that we send a method to using our pal .. So far, all of the methods we've used came with Ruby, but soon you'll be able to craft your own methods to do whatever you'd like.
Now, what about outputting some strings to the terminal? We actually have two methods to do this:
print "hello"; print " world"
puts "hello"; puts "world"
Can you spot the difference? puts inserts a new line at the end of the string while print does not.