From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2004-08-13T04:34:00+09:00
Subject: Re: How about a String#chars method?

Warren Brown wrote:
> Ara,
> 
>>something like this
>>
>>  ~ > cat b.rb
>>  class String
>>    def chars width = 1
>>      unpack "a#{ width }" *  (size / width + (size % width == 0 ? 0 :
> 
> 1))
> 
>>    end
>>  end
> 
>     I wish it were that easy, but multi-byte character sets are not
> always fixed-width.  For example, UTF-8 characters can be anywhere from
> one byte to (theoretically) six bytes long.  So the multi-byte handling
> would have to be a little more sophisticated.

And anyhow, some of this will be addressed in 2.0, so I'm not sure
how much effort we want to invest in a temporary solution.

Matz has his own ideas about how things will work. An each_char may or
may not be added. I fear it wouldn't be trivial to implement.

See Matz's reply to my post of 2 May 2004:
http://ruby-talk.com/blade/99047


Hal