Section 2.16. Implicit and Explicit Conversion

2.15. Converting Between Characters and ASCII Codes

In Ruby, a character is already an integer. This behavior is slated to change in 2.0 or perhaps sooner. In future versions of Ruby, the current plan is to store a character as a one-character string.

str = "Martin" print str[0]        # 77

If a Fixnum is appended directly onto a string, it is converted to a character:

str2 = str << 111   # "Martino"