Dmitrii Dimandt wrote: > Substrings? Finding occurence of a string in a nother string? Those operations are precisely what regexes are best at. > shouldn't str[0..3] work on characters (for a string with encoding > set)? Maybe I want to do something like > str[0] = Unicode::upcase(str[0])? :) What about str.sub!(/^./){ |c| Unicode::upcase(c) } That hardly seems more cryptic to me. It's not that I don't understand the attraction; it's just that I think when handling char-strings it's best to change your mental model to something further away from char/byte arrays. BTW, if str[0..3] returns the first 4 characters, then how do I get the first 4 bytes? Daniel