On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:59 PM, Brent Clark <brentgclarklist / gmail.com> wrote: > Hiya > > Im going through the Ruby Cookbook. > > On page 51, there is the following example > > letter = { ?v => 'aeiou', ?c => 'xyz' } > > My question is, what does the key ?v do or mean. irb(main):008:0> ?v.class => Fixnum irb(main):009:0> ?v => 118 irb(main):010:0> "v"[0] => 118 It's a literal that contains the numeric value of the character v Jesus.