From: Oreo Shake Date: 2010-01-28T10:42:21+09:00 Subject: String Manipulation Problems (decoding hex) First, I'm a java guy. I have a file that contains hex (e.g. 890dfbcb...) and I'm trying to pass that to an OpenSSL::Cipher object as the key/iv. For the sake of the question, I'm going to cut the key down in size In Java I'd do the following (using apache commons codec library) Hex hex = new Hex() // why these methods aren't static, i'll never know key = "890dfbcb"; hex.decode(key.getBytes()); (Trying to include as much as possible due to my n00b status) The value of key.getBytes is [56, 57, 48, 100, 102, 98, 99, 98] The value of hex.decode(key.getBytes()) is [-119, 13, -5, -53] In ruby: key.unpack("H*")[0] = 3839306466626362 key.hex = 2299395019 When I call cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new key = cipher.random_key key is a bunch of unicode/binary data. I'm definitely losing something in the translation here. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.