Ruby - Convert Integer to String

Question

In Ruby, trying to print out the individual elements of a String is giving me trouble. Instead of seeing each character, I\'m seeing their ASCII values instead:

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Answer 1

To summarize:

This behavior will be going away in version 1.9, in which the character itself is returned, but in previous versions, trying to reference a single character of a string by its character position will return its character value (so "ABC"[2] returns 67)

There are a number of methods that return a range of characters from a string (see the Ruby docs on the String slice method) All of the following return "C":

"ABC"[2,1] 
"ABC"[2..2]
"ABC".slice(2,1)

I find the range selector to be the easiest to read. Can anyone speak to whether it is less efficient?