string.chars.length vs string.length

Question

I'm migrating from Rails 2.1.2 to 2.3.5 and one of the items that doesn't work anymore is

"string".chars.length

I used the console to discover that "string".chars is a ActiveSupport method in 2.1.2 and an Enumerable in 2.3.5

So, in completing this migration, I was wondering what the difference is in using

"string".chars.length

vs

"string".length

Will they return the same thing? They appear to, I just wanted to know if you know the difference so I can learn?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you were using the #chars method because you were dealing with unicode strings, then you can use #mb_chars instead, and this is probably your best bet to guarantee your code acts the exact same as it did in 2.1.2:

"string".mb_chars.length
=> 6

However, if you're using Ruby 1.9, or if you're on Ruby 1.8 but don't need to deal with any unicode strings, you can just use "string".length. (In Ruby 1.9, #mbchars just returns self anyway since 1.9 has much better support for unicode strings.)

See the API documentation for more info.