From: "Aaron D. Gifford" <astounding@...>
Date: 2010-03-08T00:26:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Base-64 encoding--Just for the fun of it!

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 4:31 PM,  <apeiros@gmx.net> wrote:
> (s.unpack("B*")[0]+'0'*((6-s.size*8%6)%6)).scan(/.{6}/).map{|e|c[e.to_i(2)]}*''+'='*((3-s.size%3)%3)

I notice you could shave off 2 more characters by using the same ?
character literal for the '0' and the '=' characters:
(s.unpack("B*")[0]+?0*((6-s.size*8%6)%6)).scan(/.{6}/).map{|e|c[e.to_i(2)]}*''+?=*((3-s.size%3)%3)

I hope you don't mind, but I added your version to my file at:
  http://www.aarongifford.com/base64.rb.txt

And I stole your character literal and range expansion (splat) ideas
to improve my longer algorithm a bit too.

Thanks again for teaching me about Range expansion inside method calls.

Aaron out.