How to access individual characters in a string (as strings)?

ruby-talk
1

I'm embarrassed to ask such a seeminly simple question, but I can't
figure out how to "easily" get the individual characters/bytes out of a
string as strings. For example:

"abc"[0]
# => 97
"abc"[0..0]
# => "a"

The first form gives me the character as a Fixnum, but I want a string.
The second form gives me what I want but it seems ugly. Is there a
better way to get at a given character, *as a string* ?

Thanks for any and all help!

Justin

2

m4dc4p wrote:

I'm embarrassed to ask such a seeminly simple question, but I can't
figure out how to "easily" get the individual characters/bytes out of a
string as strings. For example:

"abc"[0]
# => 97
"abc"[0..0]
# => "a"

The first form gives me the character as a Fixnum, but I want a string.
The second form gives me what I want but it seems ugly. Is there a
better way to get at a given character, *as a string* ?

There's no good way. In future Ruby, you'll get strings anyway
instead of Fixnums.

I usually use the [n..n] approach, but you can also do something
like: str[n].chr if you like that better.

Hal

3

"abc"[0,1] ???

···

m4dc4p <jgbailey@gmail.com> wrote:

"abc"[0]
# => 97

--
une bévue

4

Lots of different ways, some of which are enumerated here:

and here:

http://www.troubleshooters.cxm/codecorn/ruby/basictutorial.htm#_Strings

You can use a lot of the same methods on both Arrays and Strings.

SteveT

Steve Litt

slitt@troubleshooters.com

···

On Friday 06 January 2006 03:03 am, m4dc4p wrote:

I'm embarrassed to ask such a seeminly simple question, but I can't
figure out how to "easily" get the individual characters/bytes out of a
string as strings. For example:

"abc"[0]
# => 97
"abc"[0..0]
# => "a"

The first form gives me the character as a Fixnum, but I want a string.
The second form gives me what I want but it seems ugly. Is there a
better way to get at a given character, *as a string* ?

Thanks for any and all help!

5

What are you doing withe the strings next?

You might want to have a look at StringScanner.

6

i agree, this looks a lot better to me than "abc"[0..0] does, and i've
always used this.

···

2006/1/6, Une bévue <pere.noel@laponie.com>:

m4dc4p <jgbailey@gmail.com> wrote:

> "abc"[0]
> # => 97

"abc"[0,1] ???

7

Just a suggestion:

class String
  def chr(index)
    self[index..index]
  end
end

    s = "Ruby"
    t s.chr(0), "R"
    t s.chr(3), "y"
    t s.chr(4), ""
    t s.chr(-1), "y"
    t s.chr(-4), "R"
    t s.chr(-5), nil

But nothing beats s[0]="R", it's much cleaner.

Christer

···

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