From: Matthew PATTISON <mfp@...>
Date: 2002-05-01T01:27:19+09:00
Subject: Sockets problem

Hi,

I'm having problems writing a ruby script that connects, via a socket, to a
program which seems to use a windows style line separator (e.g. "\r\f" or
something like that) instead of "\n" when communicating over the socket. 

The code:

socket.print "a string\r\f"

seems to work OK to get data from the ruby script to the application (this 
mostly solves the problem I was having in [ruby-talk:36784] 
http://www.ruby-talk.org/36784  

but some funny stuff still happens when calling:

socket.gets

e.g. Ruby seems to wait a long time before gets() returns, even when there's 
stuff waiting on the socket. I've tried setting $/ = "\r\f" but that didn't
work - my script just hung. Any ideas? Is $/ the right variable to set so that
socket.gets will look for a different line separator?

Matt