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Chapter 2. The Structure and Execution of Ruby Programs > Lexical Structure
2.1. Lexical Structure
The Ruby interpreter parses a program as a sequence of tokens. Tokens include comments, literals, punctuation, identifiers, and keywords. This section introduces these types of tokens and also includes important information about the characters that comprise the tokens and the whitespace that separates the tokens.
2.1.1. Comments
Comments in Ruby begin with a # character and continue to the end of the line. The Ruby interpreter ignores the # character and any text that follows it (but does not ignore the newline character, which is meaningful whitespace and may serve as a statement terminator). If a # character appears within a string or regular expression literal (see Chapter 3), then it is simply part of the string or regular expression and does not introduce a comment:
