What is the difference between quotation marks and the colon in chef attributes?

Question

I am currently creating a wrapper cookbook, while trying to restrict myself to the correct formatting by using Rubocop and Foodcritic. However, I constantly get the following errors:

Use strings in preference to symbols to access node attributes

and

Access node attributes in a consistent manner

this made me wonder, Is there a difference between colons and quotation marks?

Answer 1

Yes...colons are used for defining symbols while strings are defined by quotes... so:

:variable1 is a symbol named variable1

:'variable is 1' is a symbol

'variable1' - is a string

"variable#{1}" - is a string that could have variables defined in it. Double quotes interpret the string while single quotes use the string as is.

and

'variable1'.to_sym is same as :variable1