From: Bob Hutchison <hutch@...>
Date: 2002-05-06T03:51:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Advice on Memory Related Performance Tuning

On 5/5/02 10:32 AM, "Sean Russell" <ser@germane-software.com> wrote:

> 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


Thanks. This came up in another thread (I asked a couple of these questions
more explicitly a few days after posting this message). The pack method is
faster, but most importantly, it behaves better with bigger arrays (than the
obvious method using << and a loop).