From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2002-05-05T23:32:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Advice on Memory Related Performance Tuning

Hi Bob,

I can't answer most of your questions, but I can help you with the last:

Bob Hutchison wrote:
> While playing around with this I thought of using an array to store the
> characters and then convert that to a string when necessary.
> 
> Q3. How do you convert between an array of characters/fixnums and strings?

Array.pack() and String.unpack().

If you're converting ISO-8859-1 text, use "C*" as the parameter to pack() 
and unpack().  If you're doing UTF-8, use "U*".

        array = 'sean'.unpack('C*')
        string = array.pack('C*')

Check your favorite Ruby book for more options to pack() and unpack().  It 
is a handy method, and fairly fast, although I'm not sure it would save you 
much in the way of object allocation time.

--- SER