From: Dan Fitzpatrick <dan@...>
Date: 2005-07-18T22:00:28+09:00
Subject: Bitwise Shift Porting from PHP

I am trying to port the OLE Reader from PHP to read Excel files on any 
platform. I am stuck on the following function:

function GetInt4d($data, $pos) {
   return ord($data[$pos]) | (ord($data[$pos+1]) << 8) | \
   (ord($data[$pos+2]) << 16) | (ord($data[$pos+3]) << 24);
}

My ruby version is:

def get_int_4_d(data, pos)
   (data[pos]) | ((data[pos+1]) << 8) | \
   ((data[pos+2]) << 16) | ((data[pos+3]) << 24)
end

It works in some cases but in the example xls file I am using, when 
data[pos,0] is the character �, the function returns -2 in PHP and 
4294967294 in Ruby.

Thanks for your help.

Dan