paul lutus

Hex numbers are numbers.

To answer your question, you can extract bytes from a string:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

s = "this is a test"

i = 0
while (i < s.size)
puts s[i] # emits numbers, not characters
i += 1
end

Bu I don't think Ruby recognizes characters, Unicode or otherwise. So it may
not be able to interpret a mixture of Unicode and UTF/8 without explicit
code from the programmer.

--
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com