On Jun 26, 2006, at 2:13 AM, Joel VanderWerf wrote:

>
> irb(main):001:0> "It's needlessly cryptic."[/./]
> => "I"
>
> Not disagreeing, just trying to get more credit for regexes.
>
> irb(main):010:0> "It's needlessly cryptic."[/.{17}(.)/, 1]
> => "r"
>
> That's a bit more cryptic.
>

It's funny I'm always forgetting you can index by regexp. But this  
brings up a good point, this is Ruby, with the new Hash / named  
argument syntax we can do:

"It's needlessly cryptic."[byte:2]

This doesn't add anything at all to the conversation, but I think it  
looks good, and it's in the "make similiar things look similar" vein.

Indexing Strings

s[0]      # The first character
s[/./]    # The first character
s[byte:0] # The first byte (of a string with some non ascii  
compatible encoding)