Henry House <hajhouse / houseag.com> writes: > I know about one special method to construct a string literal: %q(string), > where () may be replaced by any convenient delimiter. I cannot find > documentation on this anywhere. Are there any others, for example, an > equivalent of qw/elem1 elem2/ in perl? Yes, and a few of the special constructors are described at these URLs: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/man-1.4/syntax.html#string http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/man-1.4/syntax.html#regexp http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/man-1.4/syntax.html#array The pickaxe book describes them all in one place. An online version is available at http://www.rubycentral.com/, but I highly recommend buying a physical version. This will (a) pay the authors for a great book and (b) give you page numbers, which are necessary when the book says "this is described more on page XYZ."