From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2010-03-01T23:15:13+09:00
Subject: Re: What is '?' in Ruby?

Alexander Bubnov wrote:
> I know
> Ruby 1.8 '?a' => 97
> Ruby 1.9 '?a' => "a"

It's a character literal - but in 1.9 a character is a one-character 
string (possibly multiple bytes) rather than an Integer for a single 
byte in 1.8.

You'll see the same difference with "a"[0]

> Really I would like to where I can get specification of operator,
> keyword, function or something else I do know what is name of '?'...

For 1.8 (actually 1.6.8 :-)

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_stdtypes.html

"You can also get the integer value corresponding to an ASCII character 
or escape sequence by preceding it with a question mark"

For 1.9: you have to buy the more recent version of this book.

> Please just point to chapter of ruby specification

Please point me to any ruby specification :-)

Actually, there is a project which is attempting to create a 
specification of Ruby for standardisation; it was linked to in this 
mailing list within the last few days. However it's using 1.8.7 as it's 
starting point, on the grounds that 1.9 is still a moving target.

I attempted to document strings in 1.9, but only got as far as 
documenting about 200 behaviours. 
http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.