Turning long fixed number to array Ruby

Question

Is there a method in ruby to turn fixnum like 74239 into an array like [7,4,2,3,9]?

Answer 1

The divmod method can be used to extract the digits one at a time

def digits n
  n= n.abs
  [].tap do |result|
    while n > 0 
      n,digit = n.divmod 10
      result.unshift digit
    end
  end
end

A quick benchmark showed this to be faster than using log to find the number of digits ahead of time, which was itself faster than string based methods.

bmbm(5) do |x|
  x.report('string') {10000.times {digits_s(rand(1000000000))}}
  x.report('divmod') {10000.times {digits_divmod(rand(1000000000))}}
  x.report('log') {10000.times {digits(rand(1000000000))}}
end

#=>
             user     system      total        real
string   0.120000   0.000000   0.120000 (  0.126119)
divmod   0.030000   0.000000   0.030000 (  0.023148)
log      0.040000   0.000000   0.040000 (  0.045285)