Question

Why doesn’t this code work:

"hello \nworld".each_line(separator = '\n') {|s| p s}

while this works?

"hello \nworld".each_line(separator = $/) {|s| p s}

Answer 1

A 10 second google yielded this:

$/ is the input record separator, newline by default.

The first one doesn’t work because you used single quotes. Backslash escape sequences are ignored in single quoted strings. Use double quotes instead:

"hello \nworld".each_line(separator = "\n") {|s| p s}