On Thursday 24 September 2009, ThomasW wrote:
> |Hi all,
> |
> |I read from to the docs[1] that string[index] should do the
> |following:  "If passed a single Fixnum, returns the code of the
> |character at that position."
> |
> |This is working as documented with Ruby 1.8.6, but it isn't with Ruby
> |1.9.1p129 (on my WinXP machine).  Why is this so?
> |
> |Thanks for any hints
> |Thomas W.
> |
> |[1] http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M000771
> |

Because you're looking at the documentation for ruby 1.8, not at that for ruby 
1.9. The documentation for ruby 1.9, which you can find at
http://ruby-doc.org/ruby-1.9/index.html, states that in ruby 1.9, String#[] 
returns the character at the given position, not its code. To obtain the code 
of the character, you can use its ord method: 

'a'.ord
=> 97

I hope this helps

Stefano