From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-24T00:29:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Iterating through a string and removing leading characters

Randy Kramer wrote:

> On Wednesday 23 March 2005 04:04 am, Robert Klemme wrote:
> 
>>The internal buffer (the characters) is shared but there is a new Ruby
>>instance each time you invoke String#[]:
> Oh, yeah, thanks--I could/should have tried that. ;-)
> 
> Aside: but:
> 
> irb(main):005:0> 10.times { puts s1[2].id }
> 211 [times ten]
> => 10
> irb(main):006:0>
> 
> Which (maybe) looks nicer/more reasonable, except I don't know why the 3 digit 
> ID in this case.

string[number] returns either nil or the ASCII number of the character 
at that place.

So "foo"[0] == ?f. And the object_id of low Fixnums is usually very low 
as their value is directly stored in it.

You can work around this by instead doing "foo"[0, 1] which will return 
"f". I think this behavior is subject to change in Rite, but it's not 
yet clear what it will change to.