From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-07-16T02:38:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Determining if a String is marshalled

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Berger" <djberge@qwest.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: Determining if a String is marshalled


> > Of course, the string might actually start with those bytes, but they
are
> > low ("\004\006" on my machine) so unlikely to occur in a normal string.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Brian.
>
> Thanks Brian and Matz for the info.  My only concern might be that a
> pack'd string would inadvertantly pass this test.  I guess that's what
> begin/rescue is for, though. :)

Hmm, assuming a packed string can have an arbitrary value,
this could easily happen (probability 1/65536).

Here's a silly idea. When you Marshal a
string, add a singleton to it (that does
nothing). Test for that later.

  str.respond_to? :marshalled   # it's a marshalled string

However, that only works for strings in
memory, of course. If you read it in from
a file... who knows?

Hal

--
Hal Fulton
hal9000@hypermetrics.com