From: "Mikael Høilund" <mikael@...>
Date: 2008-07-28T06:51:04+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] hexdump (#171)

Oh hi, I just thought I'd golf a solution. I'm sure other people can  
do a much better job than I making a full hexdumping suite, so I just  
had some fun. Can't seem to get it lower than 78 characters,  
unfortunately.

i=0;$<.read.scan(/.{0,16}/m){puts"%08x "%i+$&.unpack('H4'*8).join('  
');i+=16}

Expanded and parenthesified, clarified:

i = 0
ARGF.read.scan(/.{0,16}/m) {
	puts(("%08x " % i) + $&.unpack('H4'*8).join(' '))
	i += 16
}

ARGF (aliased as $<) is the file handle of all file names given in the  
arguments concatenated, STDIN if none — exactly what we need. The  
regex to scan matches between 0 and 16 characters (including newline)  
greedily. Change it to 1,16 if you don't want the empty line at the end.

Instead of letting the block to scan take an argument, I used a trick  
I picked up from the last Ruby Quiz I participated in (Obfuscated  
Email), and use $& inside the block, which is the last regex match.  
Saves two characters \o/

The unpack returns an array of eight strings, each of four characters,  
with the hexadecimal representation of the ASCII value of two  
consecutive characters. Fun, fun, fun.