From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2010-11-04T20:03:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Splitting a string into characters - not bytes

On Thursday 04 November 2010, Peter Hickman wrote:
> |I realise that this is probably a known thing but my google-fu is not
> |working today.
> |
> |I am learning Japanese and I wanted to write an application (probably
> |a web app) that I can paste some Japanese into and highlight the
> |characters that I should know. To do this I need to take a string of
> |Japanese, such as "目が覚めてしまった。眠いのに…。" and break it down into
> |characters, that is this string contains 16 characters and a space
> |(despite being 49 bytes long).
> |
> |Of course some strings also contain latin characters mixed in, such as
> |"俺の嫁と会話２ | あねこ".
> |
> |My home-brew solutions always seem to screw up, but then I thought.
> |This is Ruby! Why the heck am I reinventing the wheel?
> |
> |So can someone clue me in on how to take a string of Japanese and
> |break it up into characters?
> |
> |Please

What version of ruby are you using? In ruby 1.9, you can simply use 
String#each_char:

"目が覚めてしまった。眠いのに…。".each_char{|c| puts c}
=>
目
が
覚
め
て
し
ま
っ
た
。
眠
い
の
に
…
。

You may need to set the encoding appropriately, however.

I don't know how you'd do it in ruby 1.8.

I hope this helps

Stefano