Those characters are both Ruby operators and instance method names. Use the String concate method + to add those chars (which must be quoted.) my_string = 'Some special string' + ' > ' + 'the last part of the string.' or you can use replacement within double-quoted string: my_string = "The value: #{biggernum.to_s} > #{smallernum.to_s}" where biggernum and smallernum are numeric references. The 3rd way is to use the Integer instance method chr if you know the character's ordinal within the UTF-8 set. Since decimal 60 is the ordinal for "less than" ... 60.chr returns the single char string "<"