From: Adam Prescott <mentionuse@...>
Date: 2011-03-03T19:27:57+09:00
Subject: Re: How can i get the first letter of this string

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On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 5:32 AM, Thiago Massa <thiagown@gmail.com> wrote:

> irb(main):023:0> bacon=3D"chunky"
> =3D> "chunky"
> irb(main):024:0> bacon[0]
> =3D> 99
> irb(main):025:0> bacon[0].chr
> =3D> "c"
>
> 99 is the ascii number that represents the letter 'c'.
>
> I think that explains what you want.
>

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Michael Edgar <adgar@carboni.ca> wrote:

> That won't work on Ruby 1.9, as bacon[0] will return the first actual
> character. This technique
> works on both:
>
> >> bacon =3D "chunky"
> =3D> "chunky"
> >> bacon[0,1]
> =3D> "c"
>

This will not work on Ruby 1.8, because the character involved is a two-byt=
e
character, and before 1.9 there's nothing but bytes.

s =3D "=C3=A1"
s.inspect #=3D> =3D> "\303\241"
s[0] #=3D> "\303"
s[0, 1] #=3D> "\303"
s[0].chr #=3D> "\303"

Since you're on 1.8.7, you could use

$KCODE =3D "U" # UTF-8
s.chars.first #=3D> "=C3=A1"

Note that if you do not set $KCODE, you will just get "\303".

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