Two ways to convert a string to an array in Ruby

Hello everyone.
This week, I will be sharing 2 ways I have learnt how to convert a string to an array of characters. A little backstory, I was solving an algorithm on Codewars and it required me converting the string to an array. I solved it with the method I know and after submitting, I scrolled through other answers to learn how others did theirs and possible pick up one or two new knowledge.

The two methods are chars and split. They both return an array of characters but one is better than the other.

Using Chars

Let's use the string 'programming'

word = 'programming'
word.chars

# => ["p", "r", "o", "g", "r", "a", "m", "m", "i", "n", "g"]

On a sentence, we showcase how to do this with the example below

sentence = 'Ruby is great'
sentence.chars

# => ["R", "u", "b", "y", " ", "i", "s", " ", "g", "r", "e", "a", "t"]

As you can see, it returns all the characters even the `space`

Using Split

To use split, we need to pass a parameter that tells it how to split the string.

word = 'programming'
word.split('') # '' tells it to return each characters

# => ["p", "r", "o", "g", "r", "a", "m", "m", "i", "n", "g"]

For a sentence, we might want to only return each words in it.

sentence = 'Ruby is great'
sentence.split(' ') # tells it to split anywhere there is a space

# => ["Ruby", "is", "great"]

We can also split at a character.

'kolloioll'.split('o')
# => ["k", "ll", "i", "ll"]

You can also pass regex to the split method

# split at every `fullstop` before a `comma`
"sha.,ger.,ffd.,uio.".split(/.(,)/)

# => => ["sha", ",", "ger", ",", "ffd", ",", "uio."]

Difference between them

Given that split works on string using regex, it fails on strings that contains invalid characters.

"love\x80light".chars

#=> ["l", "o", "v", "e", "\x80", "l", "i", "g", "h", "t"]

"love\x80light".split('')

#=> ArgumentError (invalid byte sequence in UTF-8)

Another difference is that unlike split where you can specify where to split from, you can't do that for chars. You can only use it when you need to return all the characters in a string as an array

Resources

Stackoverflow answer to difference between char and split
API dock - String split

Let me know if you have an comments below.

Until next week