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After reading Dave Fayram’s Ruby gotcha and _why’s splat tricks, I thought I’d contribute my own Ruby syntax discovery of the day: automatic string concatenation. As you can see, it only happens when you define two strings with quotes (of any kind) consecutively in one… err… statement? Methods returning strings do not apply.

irb(main):001:0>def thing() "thing" end
irb(main):002:0> thing
=> "thing" 
irb(main):003:0> thing "string" 
ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
        from (irb):3:in `thing'
        from (irb):3
irb(main):004:0> thing() "string" 
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):4: syntax error
thing() "string" 
         ^
        from (irb):4
irb(main):05:0> "string" thing()
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):5: syntax error
"string" thing()
              ^
        from (irb):5
irb(main):06:0> "string " "thing" 
=> "string thing"