How to extract a single character (as a string) from a larger string in Ruby?

Question

What is the Ruby idiomatic way for retrieving a single character from a string as a one-character string? There is the str[n] method of course, but (as of Ruby

Answer 1

Before Ruby 1.9:

'Hello'[1].chr  # => "e"

Ruby 1.9+:

'Hello'[1]  # => "e"

A lot has changed in Ruby 1.9 including string semantics.