In the first example we first split the string using the empty string as separator. That it, we want to cut the string every place where we find an empty sting in it. In other words every character.

examples/ruby/iterate_characters_split.rb

input = 'abcdef'

chars = input.split('')
puts chars.length
puts chars[2]
puts


chars.each { |c|
    puts c
}

The resulting array has 6 elements in it as returned by the length method and the third character (index 2) is the letter c. I added these just so we can see the result of split really behaves as an array.

Finally we use the each method to iterate over the elements of the array that are the characters of the original string. See the for loop in Ruby for an explanation about the loop.

$ ruby examples/ruby/iterate_characters_split.rb
6
c

a
b
c
d
e
f

split without temporary variable

In the second example we use the same split method, but this time we called the each method right on top of the result received from split:

examples/ruby/iterate_characters.rb

input = 'abcdef'

input.split('').each { |c| 
    puts c
}

The result, not surprisingly, is the same as earlier:

$ ruby examples/ruby/iterate_characters.rb 
a
b
c
d
e
f

each_char to simplify

In order to make it even more simple, Ruby supplies a method called each_char that will do all the work:

examples/ruby/iterate_characters_each_char.rb

input = 'abcdef'

input.each_char { |c| 
    puts c
}

$ ruby examples/ruby/iterate_characters_each_char.rb 
a
b
c
d
e
f

Comments

so would it be accurate to write:

%w { 1 2 3 4 }.each do |num| s3_file "/usr/local/tomcat7-7/part[num].tif" remote_path "part[num].tif" bucket "perftest-data" aws_access_key_id "XXXXXXX" aws_secret_access_key "ZZZZZZZZ" owner "root" group "root" mode "0644" action :create end

---

You can also do it with a simple iteration loop, leveraging the fact that string objects are stored as arrays of characters:

input = 'abcdef'

input.length.times { |i| puts input[i] }