Q:

How to get unicode character that is alphabetically next?

How to get in Ruby 1.8.7 unicode character that is alphabetically right after given character?

A:

If you mean "next in the code page" then you can always hack around with the bytes and find out. You will probably end up falling into holes with no assigned characters if you go exploring the code page sequentially. This would mean "Unicode-abetically" if you can imagine such a term.
If you mean "alphabetically" then you're out of luck since that doesn't mean anything. The concept of alphabetic order varies considerably from one language to another and is sometimes even context-specific. Some languages don't even have a set order to their characters at all. This is the reason why some systems have a collation in addition to an encoding. The collation defines order, but often many letters are considered equivalent for the purposes of sorting, further complicating things.
Ruby 1.8.7 is also not aware about Unicode in general and pretends everything is an 8-bit ASCII string with one byte characters. Ruby 1.9 can parse multi-byte UTF-8 into separate characters and might make this exercise a lot easier.

