How Does Ruby handle bytes/binary?

Question

I'm trying to send a series of binary bytes across a socket, to meet a particular standard my company uses. No one in my company has used Ruby for this before, but in other languages, they send the data across one byte at a time, (usually with some sort of "pack" method).

I can't find anyway to create binary on the fly, or create bytes at all (the closest I can find it how you can turn a string into the bytes representing it's characters).

I know you can say something like :

@var = 0b101010101

But how would I convert a string in the form "101010101" or the resulting integer created when I do string.to_i(2) into an actual binary. If I just send the string accross a socket, won't that just send the ASCII for "0" and "1" instead of the literal characters?

Surely there is SOME way to do this natively in Ruby?

Answer 1

Don't know if this helps enough, but you can index the bits in an integer in ruby.

n = 0b010101

n # => 21

n = 21

n[0]  # => 1
n[1]  # => 0
n[2]  # => 1
n[3]  # => 0
n[4]  # => 1
n[5]  # => 0

Answer 2

To make a string that has an arbitrary sequence of bytes, do something like this:

binary_string = "\xE5\xA5\xBD"

The "\x" is a special escape to encode an arbitrary byte from hex, so "\xE5" means byte 0xE5.

Then try sending that string on the socket.