How can I comment multiple lines in Ruby?


#!/usr/bin/env ruby

=begin
Every body mentioned this way
to have multiline comments.

The =begin and =end must be at the beginning of the line or
it will be a syntax error.
=end

puts "Hello world!"

<<-DOC
Also, you could create a docstring.
which...
DOC

puts "Hello world!"

"..is kinda ugly and creates
a String instance, but I know one guy
with a Smalltalk background, who
does this."

puts "Hello world!"

##
# most
# people
# do
# this


__END__

But all forgot there is another option.
Only at the end of a file, of course.
  • This is how it looks (via screenshot) - otherwise it's hard to interpret how the above comments will look. Click to Zoom-in:

Comments in a text-editor


=begin
My 
multiline
comment
here
=end

Despite the existence of =begin and =end, the normal and a more correct way to comment is to use #'s on each line. If you read the source of any ruby library, you will see that this is the way multi-line comments are done in almost all cases.


#!/usr/bin/env ruby

=begin
Between =begin and =end, any number
of lines may be written. All of these
lines are ignored by the Ruby interpreter.
=end

puts "Hello world!"

Using either:

=begin
This
is
a
comment
block
=end

or

# This
# is
# a
# comment
# block

are the only two currently supported by rdoc, which is a good reason to use only these I think.