jason solomon wrote in post #1000974:
> I am new to Ruby so I apologize if this seems dumb.
>
> I am currently running ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174)
> [universal-darwin10.0].
>
> When working in an irb session I'm having trouble with String element
> reference.
>
> Example:
>
> a = "hello"
>
> a[0] should return "h", but instead is returning 104.
>
> Seems like it's return the ascii value of the element, but why?
>
>
> When I do a[0,3] the return is the expected "hel".
>
>
>
>
> Any ideas as to why a[0] is returning a FixNumb object?
>

For some reason Matz thought it was more useful to define the [] method 
for strings to return the ascii value.  As you discovered, if you 
specify a length as the second argument, you get the characters. 
Applying that knowledge, if you specify a length of 1, you will get the 
character.  So the expression:

str[0,1]

will return the character in both ruby 1.8 and ruby 1.9.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.