iterating over each character of a String in ruby 1.8.6 (each_char)

Question

I am new to ruby and currently trying to operate on each character separately from a base String in ruby. I am using ruby 1.8.6 and would like to do something like:

"ABCDEFG".each_char do |i|
  puts i
end

This produces a undefined method `each_char' error.

I was expecting to see a vertical output of:

A
B
C
D
..etc

Is the each_char method defined only for 1.9? I tried using the plain each method, but the block simply ouputs the entire string in one line. The only way I figure how to do this, which is rather inconvenient is to create an array of characters from the begining:

['A','B','C','D','...'].each do|i|
  puts i
end

This outputs the desired:

A
B
C
..etc

Is there perhaps a way to achive this output using an unmodified string to begin with?

I think the Java equivalent is:

for (int i = 0; i < aString.length(); i++){
  char currentChar = aString.charAt(i);
  System.out.println(currentChar);
}

Answer 1

I have the same problem. I usually resort to String#split:

"ABCDEFG".split("").each do |i|
  puts i
end

I guess you could also implement it yourself like this:

class String
  def each_char
    self.split("").each { |i| yield i }
  end
end

Edit: yet another alternative is String#each_byte, available in Ruby 1.8.6, which returns the ASCII value of each char in an ASCII string:

"ABCDEFG".each_byte do |i|
  puts i.chr # Fixnum#chr converts any number to the ASCII char it represents
end