Display Extended-ASCII character in Ruby

Question

How can I print an Extended-ASCII character to the console. For instance if I use the following

puts 57.chr

It will print "9" to the console. If I were to use

puts 219.chr

It will only display a "?". It does this for all of the Extended-ASCII codes from 128 to 254. Is there a way to display the proper character instead of a "?".

Woolgrower

Note that "Extended ASCII" is an umbrella term, it doesn't refer to a specific character encoding. – Asexual

I am trying to using the drawing characters to create graphics in my console program. I can't use anything like curses. ASCII Code 219 is a solid block. – Woolgrower

You should use Unicode/UTF-8 (unless you have to support legacy systems). See Block Elements and Box-drawing. – Asexual

So if for instance, if I was going to use the Unicode character U+2588 (the full block) how would I print that to the console in Ruby. – Woolgrower

Answer 1

I am trying to using the drawing characters to create graphics in my console program.

You should use UTF-8 nowadays.

Here's an example using characters from the Box Drawing Unicode block:

puts "╔═══════╗\n║ Hello ║\n╚═══════╝"

Output:

╔═══════╗
║ Hello ║
╚═══════╝

So if for instance I was going to use the Unicode character U+2588 (the full block) how would I print that to the console in Ruby.

You can use:

puts "\u2588"

or:

puts 0x2588.chr('UTF-8')

or simply:

puts '█'

Asexual

Thank You. This is exactly what I was looking for. Most of my programming experience for console applications was for DOS 6.0 and ASCII was still king. Programming in Windows I never had to worry about it. – Woolgrower

Answer 2

You may need to specify the encoding, e.g.:

219.chr(Encoding::UTF_8)

Ankh

You can also pass an encoding name, e.g. 219.chr('UTF-8') – Asexual

What is the encoding for Extended_ASCII because UTF-8 does not have the same characters such as the solid block and borders that ASCII does. – Woolgrower

"Extended ASCII" isn't an encoding, as such, so it's difficult to say exactly what your text is using (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII) – Ankh

Answer 3

You need to specify the encoding of the string and then convert it to UTF-8. For example if I want to use Windows-1251 encoding:

219.chr.force_encoding('windows-1251').encode('utf-8')
# => "Ы"

Similarly for ISO_8859_1:

219.chr.force_encoding("iso-8859-1").encode('utf-8')
# => "Û" 

Moist

Answer 4

You can use the method Integer#chr([encoding]):

219.chr(Encoding::UTF_8)   #=> "Û"

more information in method doc.

Arnoldarnoldo