Is 'c' said to be a character or a string in Ruby - or both?

Question

char hello[] = "hello"; #C
hello = ['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'] #Ruby

If I output the class of hello[0] in Ruby, it says "String". This is because single quoted Strings exist in Ruby and there does not seem to be the notion of a char type. The other day I said to my coworker that he had an array of characters and he said "no I don't, I have an array of Strings". Nitpicky, yes, but technically perhaps he is correct. Coming from the world of C I tend not to think of a single character as a String. Is it agreed that the hello array above is an array of Strings rather than an array of characters?

Answer 1

Your coworker would be right, Ruby doesn't seem to have any kind of Character class.

>> 'c'.class                                                            
=> String

Answer 2

Yes, there is no char class in Ruby, there is only String. (Note that char is defined as 1 byte in the C standard, but that is not the case for unicode characters).

Answer 3

Yes. While in C a string is represented as C-String, which is basically a zero-terminated array of characters, a String in Ruby is a class that stores its content in a more complex way. You can extract any part of it to a new String, and Ruby probably won't give you lower access to it. In C you get direct access to the memory of it, Ruby is a lot more abstract than that.

Answer 4

In C, a character is distinct from a string (which is an array of characters). Ruby does not have an individual character type. Strings can hold any number of characters, and Fixnums can hold the ASCII value for a character and be converted to a printable string containing that character with the #chr method.

The difference between the single-quote and double-quote string syntax in Ruby has to do with how much preprocessing (interpolation, for example) is done on the string.