From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-12-10T22:57:53+09:00
Subject: Re: chars method

On Dec 10, 2008, at 7:44 AM, Jim McKerchar wrote:

> George. If you're not yet ready to move up to a newer version of  
> Ruby, you could always add a chars method to String.....
>
> class String
>      def chars
>            self.split( "" )
>      end
> end
>
> "abcde".chars
> => ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]

Note that your method would probably be better named as bytes()  
instead of chars():

   $ ruby -e 'p "résumé".split("")'
   ["r", "\303", "\251", "s", "u", "m", "\303", "\251"]

If you wanted to support UTF-8 characters, you could replace split("")  
with scan(/./mu):

   $ ruby -KUe 'p "résumé".scan(/./mu)'
   ["r", "é", "s", "u", "m", "é"]

I've written about this on my blog quite a bit, if you are interested:

   http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/understanding_m17n

James Edward Gray II