<p>In Ruby, trying to print out the individual elements of a String is giving me trouble. Instead of seeing each character, I'm seeing their ASCII values instead: </p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt; a = "0123"
=&gt; "0123"
&gt;&gt; a[0]
=&gt; 48
</code></pre>

<p>I've looked online but can't find any way to get the original "0" back out of it. I'm a little new to Ruby to I know it has to be something simple but I just can't seem to find it.</p>

You want
```
a[0,1]
```
instead of
```
a[0]
```
.