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Ruby Ruby Foundations Strings Working With Strings

Alexander Bromage
PLUS
Alexander Bromage
Courses Plus Student 4,014 Points
Posted by Alexander Bromage
Alexander Bromage
Courses Plus Student 4,014 Points

Why did the ASCII value for the letter not appear when I used first_name[0]? Instead I got the actual letter "A".

In the video Jason sees the ASCII value and not the letter then refers to the ASCII tables to look it up. As I follow along with the exact same code (checked several times) the ASCII value does not appear the letter does.

3 Answers

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points
Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

I was curious, because what you are saying was also true in my case. So I player a bit with rvm, installed various versions of Ruby and it seems that the behavior from the videos is true for Ruby 1.8.7 and earlier. Everything after (1.9.x, 2.x) this returns letters, not ASCII codes.

Alexander Bromage
Alexander Bromage
Courses Plus Student 4,014 Points
Alexander Bromage
Alexander Bromage
Courses Plus Student 4,014 Points

But in the video he installs a 1.9.x version doesn't he? Well it isn't the most important aspect but just interested to understand why. Thanks for responding.

Aurelien Schlumberger
Aurelien Schlumberger
6,127 Points
Aurelien Schlumberger
Aurelien Schlumberger
6,127 Points

To figure out the Ordinal code you can use the following method .ord

puts "A".ord
# returns 65 for the Capital A
puts "a".ord
# returns 97

In Ruby 1.8.7 it used the question mark ? to find out the ordinal value, but it changed since Ruby 1.9. A lot of things changed between versions.

I also get A when I run

first_name = "Aurel"
first_name[0]
=> "A"

As if the string is an array of characters.

Mason Goetz
Mason Goetz
5,048 Points
Mason Goetz
Mason Goetz
5,048 Points 
irb(main):023:0> first_name[0]
=> "M"

irb(main):025:0> first_name[0].ord
=> 77