Ruby: character to ascii from a string

Question

Hi, this wiki page gave a general idea of how to convert a single char to ascii http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/ASCII

But say if I have a string and I wanted to get each character's ascii from it, what do i need to do?

"string".each_byte do |c|
      $char = c.chr
      $ascii = ?char
      puts $ascii
end

It doesn't work because it's not happy with the line $ascii = ?char

syntax error, unexpected '?'
      $ascii = ?char
                ^

Answer 1

The c variable already contains the char code!

"string".each_byte do |c|
    puts c
end

yields

115
116
114
105
110
103

Answer 2

oh right! stupid me, thanks!

Answer 3

I came accross this when trying to figure out how to get a single ascii value. It was stupidly easy and I feel dumb for having to look it up but I'll post for others.

You just use the [] operator, ie:

irb(main):001:0> "string"[0] => 115

Answer 4

"a"[0]

or

?a

Both would return their ASCII equivalent.

Answer 5

please refer to this post for the changes in ruby1.9 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1270209/getting-an-ascii-character-code-in-ruby-fails