Ruby: How to get the first character of a string

In MRI 1.8.7 or greater:

'foobarbaz'.each_char.first

"Smith"[0..0]

works in both ruby 1.8 and ruby 1.9.

If you use a recent version of Ruby (1.9.0 or later), the following should work:

'Smith'[0] # => 'S'

If you use either 1.9.0+ or 1.8.7, the following should work:

'Smith'.chars.first # => 'S'

If you use a version older than 1.8.7, this should work:

'Smith'.split(//).first # => 'S'

Note that `'Smith'[0,1]` does *not* work on 1.8, it will *not* give you the first character, it will only give you the first *byte*.

Because of an annoying design choice in Ruby before 1.9 — `some_string[0]` returns the **character code** of the first character — the most portable way to write this is `some_string[0,1]`, which tells it to get a substring at index 0 that's 1 character long.

>> s = 'Smith'
=> "Smith"
>> s[0]
=> "S"