[Ruby] what does second instruction do?

Question

l = 'abcde'
puts l =~/ab?/

Answer 1

Paolo De Nictolis
I found this in www.rubyguides.com

Matching Operator (=~)

What is this funny-looking Ruby operator (=~) with a tilde?
It’s the matching operator!
It allows you to do a quick index search using a regular expression.

Playing with your code, I can see that it returns the index of the first letter of the regular expression

The ? mark indicates that the letter following the first letter can be anything, not part of the search.

I am assuming the / before and after the string , creates the regular expression