- 2.1 Representing Ordinary Strings
- 2.2 Representing Strings with Alternate Notations
- 2.3 Using Here-Documents
- 2.4 Finding the Length of a String
- 2.5 Processing a Line at a Time
- 2.6 Processing a Character or Byte at a Time
- 2.7 Performing Specialized String Comparisons
- 2.8 Tokenizing a String
- 2.9 Formatting a String
- 2.10 Using Strings as IO Objects
- 2.11 Controlling Uppercase and Lowercase
- 2.12 Accessing and Assigning Substrings
- 2.13 Substituting in Strings
- 2.14 Searching a String
- 2.15 Converting Between Characters and ASCII Codes
- 2.16 Implicit and Explicit Conversion
- 2.17 Appending an Item onto a String
- 2.18 Removing Trailing Newlines and Other Characters
- 2.19 Trimming Whitespace from a String
- 2.20 Repeating Strings
- 2.21 Embedding Expressions within Strings
- 2.22 Delayed Interpolation of Strings
- 2.23 Parsing Comma-Separated Data
- 2.24 Converting Strings to Numbers (Decimal and Otherwise)
- 2.25 Encoding and Decoding <tt>rot13</tt> Text
- 2.26 Encrypting Strings
- 2.27 Compressing Strings
- 2.28 Counting Characters in Strings
- 2.29 Reversing a String
- 2.30 Removing Duplicate Characters
- 2.31 Removing Specific Characters
- 2.32 Printing Special Characters
- 2.33 Generating Successive Strings
- 2.34 Calculating a 32-Bit CRC
- 2.35 Calculating the SHA-256 Hash of a String
- 2.36 Calculating the Levenshtein Distance Between Two Strings
- 2.37 Encoding and Decoding Base64 Strings
- 2.38 Expanding and Compressing Tab Characters
- 2.39 Wrapping Lines of Text
- 2.40 Conclusion
2.33 Generating Successive Strings
On rare occasions, we may want to find the “successor” value for a string; for example, the successor for "aaa" is "aab" (then "aad", "aae", and so on).
Ruby provides the method succ (successor) for this purpose:
droid = "R2D2" improved = droid.succ # "R2D3" pill = "Vitamin B" pill2 = pill.succ # "Vitamin C"
We don’t recommend the use of this feature unless the values are predictable and reasonable. If you start with a string that is esoteric enough, you will eventually get strange and surprising results.
There is also an upto method that applies succ repeatedly in a loop until the desired final value is reached:
"Files, A".upto "Files, X" do |letter| puts "Opening: #{letter}" end # Produces 24 lines of output
Again, we stress that this is not used frequently, and you use it at your own risk. In addition, there is no corresponding “predecessor” function.