From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2009-08-13T14:22:42+09:00
Subject: Re: in-memory implementation of IO class

On Aug 12, 2009, at 20:34, Nathan Beyer wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:15 PM, James  
> Gray<james@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.

In ruby 1.8 no.  In ruby 1.9 set the encoding to binary.