From: Bob Showalter <bob_showalter@...>
Date: 2006-01-17T01:51:15+09:00
Subject: Re: DANGER ! Ruby-Newbie ahead: How to access binary files

Meino Christian Cramer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  There is a file on my HD, which was written by a C program. The C
>  program wrotes the contents of an array of structures (each array
>  element was made from the same structure) to that file.
> 
>  Since accessing that file looks like a very low level and
>  "procedure-based" thing to me I would be very interested how this job
>  can be done in a most ruby-like, objectoriented way.

You need to know the format of the structure and its size.

You can then use IO#read to read bytes from the file into a string and 
String#unpack to extract the individual fields from the structure.

Of course, all of this should be encapsulated into a class :-)