From: Georgy <see@...>
Date: 2004-06-05T19:43:38+09:00
Subject: Chars in Ruby

Hi,

I've been playing with characters (OK, there's no such type in
Ruby, it's rather like characters in C - just plain integer numbers).

String of length 1 to a char:   str1[0] --> chr_int
Char to a String of length 1:   chr_int.chr --> str1

Get a char from a string:    str[n]    --> chr_int   # or nil
Put a char into a string:    str[n] = chr_int

So we can think of a "char" as a single element of a string.
Now, having that an integer is a single element of an array,
we'd like to have functions/expressions for converting arrays
of integers and strings back and forth.

Array to String:    [97,98,99].map{|e|e.chr}.join --> "abc"
String to Array:    "abc" ????????????? --> [97,98,99]

I've found that this function can do it:

def s2a(s); r=[]; s.each_byte {|b| r<<b}; r; end
s2a("abc") --> [97,98,99]

But can it be an expression w/o a function or with a shorter
"more elegant" function, w/o accumulator r?

Regards,
Georgy

-- 
Georgy Pruss
E#Mail: 'naabbcaDaddaLryDwksvKmyw'.tr('a-zA-Z','0-9a-z.@')