Rails - Feb 2008 - ActiveSupport::MultyByte car and cdr? Or 'head' and 'rest'

Hi,

I''m working on an application which involves looking at words that
have macrons ( that''s the "long sound" bar over a letter ). 
Under
certain spellings the macrons move from macron-ized to ''no
macron''.

I tried to do this in Ruby without any help, but ultimately friends
and saner voices convinced me that given Ruby''s current state with
respect to UTF-8 i would be saved many sleepless nights by including
ActiveSupport::Multibyte.

And boy did it help!  Yay!

Nevertheless, as I''ve written modules to deal with the
aString.chars[x..y] to retrieve characters ( versus simple bytes
( which may or may not completely map to a character! )), I''ve found
myself writing simple recursive functions whose work would have been
made more simple by:

macronizedString.firstChar ( or the ''car'' if you Lisp )

macronizedString.restOfString ( or the ''cdr'' if you Lisp ).

or

macronizedString.lastChar

Is there a reason these are not included?  I don''t mean "hey get
off
your butts and write these for me" , I mean it more in the sense of
"am I so dumb that I''m not using the true power of the module to
do
things the easy way - versus writing painful functions".

For example ''lastChar'' works along the lines of

firstChar = macronizedString.chars[0]

lastChar = macronizedString.chars[0..macronizedString.jlength-1]

restOfString = macronizedString.chars[1..99] # assuming string < 99
chars, probably not safe, surely there''s a better way?


Thanks to Ruby''s slick "extend class" I was thinking about
adding
these methods in....am I doing a good thing or a foolish thing?  Am I
doing it in a sapient or foolish manner?

Thanks,

Steven
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