Ruby: character to ascii from a string

Question

this wiki page gave a general idea of how to convert a single char to ascii http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/ASCII

But say if I have a string and I wanted to get each character's ascii from it, what do i need to do?

"string".each_byte do |c|
      $char = c.chr
      $ascii = ?char
      puts $ascii
end

It doesn't work because it's not happy with the line $ascii = ?char

syntax error, unexpected '?'
      $ascii = ?char
                ^

Answer 1

The c variable already contains the char code!

"string".each_byte do |c|     puts c end 

yields

115 116 114 105 110 103 

Answer 2

puts "string".split('').map(&:ord).to_s 

Answer 3

use "x".ord for a single character or "xyz".sum for a whole string.

Answer 4

Ruby String provides the codepoints method after 1.9.1.

str = 'hello world'
str.codepoints
=> [104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 32, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100] 

str = "你好世界"
str.codepoints
=> [20320, 22909, 19990, 30028]