Getting an ASCII character code in Ruby using `?` (question mark) fails
Ruby before 1.9 treated characters somewhat inconsistently. ?a
and "a"[0]
would return an integer representing the character's ASCII value (which was usually not the behavior people were looking for), but in practical use characters would normally be represented by a one-character string. In Ruby 1.9, characters are never mysteriously turned into integers. If you want to get a character's ASCII value, you can use the ord
method, like ?a.ord
(which returns 97).