From: "Aaron D. Gifford" <astounding@...>
Date: 2011-04-07T13:56:43+09:00
Subject: Packing and unpacking unsigned integers of arbitrary size as binary strings

I see there's a 'w' option to pack for packing arbitrary sized
unsigned integers in BER compressed format. However I need to
pack/unpack binary strings as simple binary byte strings.

The results of my own needs have been gemmified as the bignumpack gem.
 See https://github.com/astounding/bignumpack/blob/master/lib/bignumpack.rb

Are there alternatives that may be more efficient, or if I've missed
something obvious.

I resorted to splitting the binary string into 64-bit sized chunks and
using the 'Q' packing option (except where I couldn't determine
endianness, where I resorted to using the 32-bit network-order 'N'
packing option).

While I tried to be endian-architecture friendly, I don't have a
big-endian box with Ruby on it handy to test and would appreciate it
if anyone on a big-endian box would let me know if the tests fail.

Aaron out.