Text handling

You will most likely encounter strings (texts) in your journey to becoming a Ruby developer, so it’s important to know how to handle and manipulate this type of data. Whether you need to capitalize, get a partial string, or even trim a string, Ruby comes with a vast arsenal of tools to manipulate text as we see fit. Most programming languages have this type of tool, and Ruby is not an exception. As an example, let’s say we wanted to grab a previously entered name and make sure that all the letters were in uppercase or lowercase. Ruby has two methods to do exactly that: upcase() and downcase(). Let’s try them out by creating a file called string_cases.rb with the following code:

first_name = "benjamin"
last_name = "BECKER"
puts "My full name is #{first_name} #{last_name}"

So far, we’ve declared two variables and used interpolation to output the full name. Let’s say we were to run this script on the shell...