From: Jeff de Vries <jdevries@...>
Date: 2002-11-23T07:43:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading and writing binary data from files

Posted too soon!  Just found pack and unpack under Array (not exactly 
where I was looking for I/O stuff!)


Jeff de Vries wrote:

> I just started reading about Ruby, and decided to try to use it to 
> write a utility I need.  One of the things that I need to do is to 
> read a file that contains binary data (32-bit integers, and strings 
> consisting of a 16-bit integer count followed by that many 8-bit 
> chars) created from a C program.  Poking around, I saw the sysread and 
> syswrite calls, which appear to let me read 4 bytes (for a 32-bit 
> integer, for example) into a string.  The question is, short of 
> picking each byte off one-by-one and doing the shift-add thing to 
> build up an integer, can I just say "reinterpret this memory as an 
> integer"?  I also need to go the other way, writing out binary 32-bit 
> integers.
>
> Thanks!
> Jeff
>
>
>