How Does Ruby handle bytes/binary?

Question

I\'m trying to send a series of binary bytes across a socket, to meet a particular standard my company uses. No one in my company has used Ruby for this before, but in other lan

Answer 1

To make a string that has an arbitrary sequence of bytes, do something like this:

binary_string = "\xE5\xA5\xBD"

The "\x" is a special escape to encode an arbitrary byte from hex, so "\xE5" means byte 0xE5.

Then try sending that string on the socket.

Answer 2

Don't know if this helps enough, but you can index the bits in an integer in ruby.

n = 0b010101

n # => 21

n = 21

n[0]  # => 1
n[1]  # => 0
n[2]  # => 1
n[3]  # => 0
n[4]  # => 1
n[5]  # => 0

Answer 3

Have a look at the String.unpack method. This is an example:

str = "1010"
str.unpack("cccc")
=> [49, 48, 49, 48]

This will give you integer values. There are more ways to do the conversion.