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In the screenshot, <<= doesn’t serve any purpose. << is sufficient to concatenate the string "weezards!" to the existing string in caption.
In Ruby, strings are objects and can be changed/mutated.
If we use the concat method or the concat/shovel operator <<, we aren’t creating a new string. We are modifying/mutating the existing string.
# -- Using concat method
caption = "A giraffe surrounded by "
puts caption //-- Output: "A giraffe surrounded by "
puts caption.object_id # -- An id will be printed
caption.concat("weezards!")
puts caption //-- Output: "A giraffe surrounded by weezards!"
puts caption.object_id # -- Same id as before
# -- so caption was mutated
# -- Using shovel/concatenation operator <<
caption = "A giraffe surrounded by "
puts caption # -- Output: "A giraffe surrounded by "
puts caption.object_id # -- An id will be printed
caption << "weezards!"
puts caption # -- Output: "A giraffe surrounded by weezards!"
puts caption.object_id # -- Same id as before
// -- so caption was mutated
Contrast this with the += operator.
caption = "A giraffe surrounded by "
puts caption # -- Output: "A giraffe surrounded by "
puts caption.object_id # -- An id will be printed
caption += "weezards!" # -- Shorthand for caption = caption + "weezards!"
puts caption # -- Output: "A giraffe surrounded by weezards!"
puts caption.object_id # -- Different id
// -- so new string object was assigned to caption
concat and << mutate the string object, whereas += creates a new string,
In the screenshot above, I assume that the original code was
caption += "weezards!"
After you used the << operator, you likely forgot to remove the = from += and instead wrote <<=.
But <<= doesn’t accomplish anything different than <<. The solution code also uses <<.
The reason I didn’t remove the = from line 6 is because the exercise told us to replace .push and + with <<. As I’d never encountered << before, it wasn’t clear that the = should be removed as well. One of the many little things littered throughout this course that make it difficult for a beginner to properly understand what’s going on with the code. Thankfully there are knowledgeable people such as yourself on the forum who are willing to help
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