General Delimited String Syntax Question

ruby-talk
1

The “Programming Ruby” books says in the section “General Delimited
Input”

Following the type character is a delimiter, which can be any
character. If the delimiter is one of the characters
('',[’’, {'', or<’’, the literal consists of the
characters up to the matching closing delimiter

But i tried it with

print %Qahelloa
print %Q1hello1

and this does not work. Why? What characters are allowed ?

2

Lothar Scholz wrote:

The “Programming Ruby” books says in the section “General Delimited
Input”

Following the type character is a delimiter, which can be any
character. If the delimiter is one of the characters
('', [‘’, {'', or <‘’, the literal consists of the
characters up to the matching closing delimiter

But i tried it with

print %Qahelloa
print %Q1hello1

and this does not work. Why? What characters are allowed ?

It changed… %-style literals no longer allow alphanumerics or
multi-byte characters as delimiters.

Cheers

Dave

3

It changed… %-style literals no longer allow alphanumerics or
multi-byte characters as delimiters.

Why? That seemed useful (though to be fair, I have never needed it; the
choice of the multiple ‘brackety’ chars solved any possible character-space
clash I’ve ever had.)