How to get the first character of a string in Ruby

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first character of a given string in Ruby.

Consider, we have the following string:

name = "Pearson"

Now, we want to get the first character P from the above string.

Using the chr method

In Ruby, we can use the built-in chr method to access the first character of a string.

Here is an example:

name = "Pearson"
firstChar = name.chr

puts firstChar

Output:

"P"

Similarly, we can also use the subscript syntax [0] to get the first character of a string.

name = "Pearson"
firstChar = name[0]

puts firstChar

The above syntax extracts the character from the index position 0.