Actually, my comment needs to be understood as an answer to the OP's title "Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters". I understand that there's man

Actually, my comment needs to be understood as an answer to the OP's title "Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters". I understand that there's many places where strings are shorter than 23 characters and I never meant to say that this optimization was superfluous. I actually think it's pretty clever.