Escape characters such as \n and \t represents a newline and a tab.
A single-quoted string does no such evaluation.
A single-quoted string can, however, use a backslash to indicate that the next character should be used literally.
This is useful when a single-quoted string contains a single-quote character, like this:
puts 'It\'s my party' class MyClass # ww w . java 2s.c om attr_accessor :name attr_accessor :number def initialize( aName, aNumber ) @name = aName @number = aNumber end def returnNumber return 123 end end ob = MyClass.new( "Java", "007" ) puts( "A tab\ta new line\na calculation #{2*3} and method-call #{ob.returnNumber}" )