Ruby has a question mark (?) operator that works like so
> ?a
=> "a"
> ?\s
=> " "
> ??
=> "?"
> ?a + ?b + ?c
=> "abc"
It essentially creates single character strings. At least in Ruby 1.9+ it
does. In versions of Ruby before 1.9, the ? operator could be used to get
the ascii character code of the operand character.
h/t Josh Davey