charpos

Returns the character position of the scan pointer. In the 'reset' position, this value is zero. In the 'terminated' position (i.e. the string is exhausted), this value is the size of the string.

In short, it's a 0-based index into the string.

s = StringScanner.new("abcädeföghi")
s.charpos           # -> 0
s.scan_until(/ä/)   # -> "abcä"
s.pos               # -> 5
s.charpos           # -> 4