What's the point of escaping a single backslash in single quotes in Ruby?

Question

I don't quite understand what's the point of escaping a single backslash when you have a string in single quotes in Ruby. Why does Ruby treats backslashes 'differently'?

Answer 1

backslashes are an escape character so if you were to write '\\' would think you were trying to escape the ' .

Otherwise if it treated single character strings differentls you wanted to write ' you would have to use double quotes, which will quickly get harder to maintain when you need to remember which quotes to use when.

Answer 2

If your question is actually "What is the point of the language design requiring us to escape a backslash in single (as opposed to double) quotes", then that is to allow single quotes to appear within a string literal written with single quotes. In order to do that, there must be an escape character for single quotes, which is the backslash, and then, the escape character itself needs to be escaped.