Ruby: How to get the first character of a string

How can I get the first character in a string using Ruby?

Ultimately what I'm doing is taking someone's last name and just creating an initial out of it.

So if the string was "Smith" I just want "S".

Other way around would be using the [chars][1] for a string:

```ruby
def abbrev_name
first_name.chars.first.capitalize + '.' + ' ' + last_name
end
```


[1]:

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If you're using `Rails` You can also use [`truncate`](

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)

> 'Smith'.truncate(1, omission: '')
#=> "S"

or for additional formatting:

> 'Smith'.truncate(4)
#=> "S..."

> 'Smith'.truncate(2, omission: '.')
#=> "S."


While this is definitely overkill for the original question, for a pure `ruby` solution, here is how `truncate` is implemented in `rails`

# File activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/filters.rb, line 66
def truncate(truncate_at, options = {})
return dup unless length > truncate_at

omission = options[:omission] || "..."
length_with_room_for_omission = truncate_at - omission.length
stop = if options[:separator]
rindex(options[:separator], length_with_room_for_omission) || length_with_room_for_omission
else
length_with_room_for_omission
end

"#{self[0, stop]}#{omission}"
end

Try this:

```
def word(string, num)
string = 'Smith'
string[0..(num-1)]
end
```

Another option that hasn't been mentioned yet:

> "Smith".slice(0)
#=> "S"

Try this:

>> a = "Smith"
>> a[0]
=> "S"

**OR**

>> "Smith".chr
#=> "S"

Any of these methods will work:

name = 'Smith'
puts name.[0..0] # => S
puts name.[0] # => S
puts name.[0,1] # => S
puts name.[0].chr # => S

In Rails

name = 'Smith'
name.first

You can use Ruby's open classes to make your code much more readable. For instance, this:

class String
def initial
self[0,1]
end
end

will allow you to use the `initial` method on any string. So if you have the following variables:

last_name = "Smith"
first_name = "John"


Then you can get the initials very cleanly and readably:

puts first_name.initial # prints J
puts last_name.initial # prints S

The other method mentioned here doesn't work on Ruby 1.8 (not that you should be using 1.8 anymore anyway!--but when this answer was posted it was still quite common):

puts 'Smith'[0] # prints 83

Of course, if you're not doing it on a regular basis, then defining the method might be overkill, and you could just do it directly:

puts last_name[0,1]

For completeness sake, since Ruby 1.9 String#chr returns the first character of a string. Its still available in 2.0 and 2.1.

"Smith".chr #=> "S"

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