Rails - Nov 2005 - first letter of UTF-8 string?

How to get first letter of UTF-8 string?

I try with :
item.name.slice(0..0) -- works ok when first letter is regular ascii 
character, don''t works for local Croatian characters:
"ŠĐČĆŽšđčćž"

item.name.slice(0..1) -- this works ok for items starting with Croatian 
character but returns two letters for other items

Is there slice version (or something like that) which works with 
characters not bytes.

Thanks,
Igor.

Hi !

2005/11/9, Igor Anic <ianic@4dva.hr>:
> Is there slice version (or something like that) which works with
> characters not bytes.
Unfortunately, Ruby String objects always work with bytes, not
characters.  You will have to look into the Unicode Gem.
Unfortunately, it requires some kind of local extension to be
installed.  I have never worked with it myself.

Bye,
François

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Igor Anic wrote:
> How to get first letter of UTF-8 string?
$KCODE = ''u''
string.match(/^./).to_s