How to get a char of a Ruby string?

gistfile1.rb

# Just came across String#chars method, which returns an enumerable. 
# It's implementation is much simpler than String#split. 
# A simple benchmark shows that String#chars is much faster than String#split.

require 'benchmark/ips'

Benchmark.ips do |r|
  s = "The Snow Queen"

  r.report('chars') do
    s.chars.first
  end

  r.report('split') do
    s.split('').first
  end
end

# Due to the different implementations of [] method in 1.8.7 and 1.9+, s[i] doesn't work consistently as you expected.
# It's safe to extract chars after splitting.