Strings

Our original definition of a string was "A sequence of characters enclosed in quotation marks; Ruby's representation of text." Strings and arrays have much in common. Both are sequences that can be accessed and manipulated, often using the same methods. It's useful to think of strings as arrays of one-character strings, though ["c", "a", "t"] and "cat" are not technically equivalent.

Access, Assignment, and Concatenation

Like arrays, strings use the bracket method for access. Each character corresponds to an index. Strings are zero-indexed like arrays. The only difference between array access and string access is that the first and last methods are unavailable to strings.

String assignment uses the same syntax as array assignment.

As you'd probably guess, one concatenates strings similarly to arrays. The only difference is that the shovel operator (<<) also concatenates strings. While shoveling one array into another causes nestedness, strings cannot be nested; << therefore merely concatenates strings.

It's also sometimes useful to multiply strings using the * operator, which functions as you'd expect: