From: George Ogata <g_ogata@...>
Date: 2004-08-28T04:10:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Question about ? operator for ASCII

Barry Sperling <barry@angleinc.com> writes:

> Hello,
> 	I am a nuby and I couldn't find how to get the ASCII value of a 
> character in a variable.  I looked in the Pragmatic Programmer and did this:
>
> s = "ABC DE."
> s.scan( /./ ) do |a|
>       puts ?a
> end
>
> but only got the ASCII value of the small letter 'a' ( 97 ).  What do I 
> need to do?
> 	Thanks,
> 		Barry

Just to add to what others have said:

`?' is _not_ an operator (in the sense that `!', `~', etc. are).
Rather, `?a' is a literal for the character 'a', just as `10' is the
literal for the integer ten, and 1.0 is the literal for the floating
point number one-point-oh.  It also happens that in ruby these
"characters" are really numbers (actually Fixnums), just like in C.
This can be demonstrated in irb:

irb(main):001:0> ?a
=> 97
irb(main):002:0> ?a.class
=> Fixnum
irb(main):003:0> 97.class
=> Fixnum
irb(main):004:0> ?a.equal? 97
=> true

HTH.