From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2010-04-18T01:41:30+09:00
Subject: Re: what is String#ord?

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Xavier Noria <fxn@hashref.com> wrote:

> Ruby 1.9 docs for String#ord say:
>
>    Return the <code>Integer</code> ordinal of a one-character string.
>
> What does that mean? Check for example
>
>    "×".ord # => 215
>    "×".bytes.to_a # => [195, 151]

Trial and error suggests it is the code of the character in the
encoding of the string:

    euro = "\u20AC"

    euro.ord.to_s(16) # => "20ac"
    euro.encode("iso-8859-15").ord.to_s(16) # => "a4"

That is what the source code suggests also:

VALUE
rb_str_ord(VALUE s)
{
    unsigned int c;

    c = rb_enc_codepoint(RSTRING_PTR(s), RSTRING_END(s), STR_ENC_GET(s));
    return UINT2NUM(c);
}