From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-12-12T14:37:30+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7067] Re: Reading lots of binary data into arrays

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:7049] Reading lots of binary data into arrays"
    on 00/12/12, Dwight Tuinstra <tuinstra@clarkson.edu> writes:

|1)  Are there packages/extensions/modules available
|    for reading large amounts of binary data into arrays
|    of structures?  I know that binary data can be read
|    a "char" at a time, but this is likely to be too
|    slow.

Read fixed sized string using IO#read then unpack it into integers
using String#unpack.  For example:

  input = open(path_to_file, "r")
  ary = []
  size_of_an_entry = (32*3+2*16)/8
  
  while str = input.read(size_of_an_entry)
    ary.push(str.unpack("NNNnn")) # assuming network byte order
  end

|2)  What is the best library to use to get fastest
|    performance in displaying a large array of data?
|    (Each element of the array is displayed as a small
|    bar of different size and color). I recall reading 
|    somewhere that gtk was faster than Tk.  Is this true?

Ruby/Gtk is often faster than Ruby/Tk since it does not work via Tcl.

							matz.