what is "?" in ruby

Question

Ruby 1.9

irb(main):001:0> ?c
=> "c"

Ruby 1.8.6

 irb(main):001:0> ?c
 => 99

what does "?" mean ?

Answer 1

It denotes a "character". In ruby 1.8, this was represented by the ascii-code of the character. In Ruby 1.9, it's a single-character String.