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.
Kind Regards
Brent C.
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:59 PM, Brent C. [email protected]
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.
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 6:59 AM, Brent C.
[email protected]wrote:
Kind Regards
Brent C.
In earlier versions of Ruby, prefixing a character with a question mark
was
sort of a literal for a given character. I just checked irb for 1.8.6
and
1.8.7, ?v would return 118, which is the ascii value of the character v,
and
in 1.9.1 it returned “v” the one character String. Another place you can
see
this shift take place is in String#[] where you might say “vat”[0] in
1.8
you would get 118, and in 1.9 you would get “v”
A more idiomatic alternative would probably be to use symbols as hash
keys.
letter = { :vowels => ‘aeiou’ , :consonants => ‘xyz’ }
(I don’t have the book, I’m guessing as to what ?v and ?c are supposed
to
mean)
It returns ASCII code following for character question mark:
For example:
irb(main):002:0> ?a
=> 97