From: pharrington <xenogenesis@...>
Date: 2009-08-13T13:25:11+09:00
Subject: Re: in-memory implementation of IO class

On Aug 12, 11:34 pm, Nathan Beyer <nbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:15 PM, James Gray<ja...@grayproductions.net> wrote:
> > On Aug 12, 2009, at 10:07 PM, Nathan Beyer wrote:
>
> >> Is there an implementation of the IO class that operates on in-memory
> >> byte arrays (or other data structure)? I haven't seen anything in the
> >> core/stdlib.
>
> > Yes, see the standard StringIO library.
>
> > James Edward Gray II
>
> Excuse my ignorance -- I'm just getting into Ruby, but isn't the
> StringIO for working with character data? Is there no distinction
> between characters and bytes? I was assuming that StringIO and String
> would cause some form of character encoding/decoding processing to
> kick in.
>
> Thanks
> - Nathan

I would think this is what the #bytes, #each_byte, #readbyte, etc
methods are for. But I've never actually used StringIO *myself*, so I
can't say for sure. (However, the fact that Rack and ActionPack both
use StringIO for processing requests says its safe for raw data)