Issue #7050 has been reported by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). ---------------------------------------- Bug #7050: encoding of String#unpack for 'H', 'h', 'B' and 'b' https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7050 Author: Eregon (Benoit Daloze) Status: Open Priority: Normal Assignee: Category: core Target version: 2.0.0 ruby -v: ruby 2.0.0dev (2012-07-15 trunk 36395) [x86_64-darwin10.8.0] Originally mentioned in #6799, I think the encoding of the resulting Strings for the 'H', 'h', 'B' and 'b' directives of String#unpack should be encoded in US-ASCII, because they will always contain 0-9a-f (0-1 for 'B','b') chars. This is already done for the 'm', 'M' and 'u' directives in Array#pack. It would also fix SecureRandom hexdigests as mentioned in #6799. P.S.: Does anyone know the rationale behind which method to use for 'u','m','M' and 'H','h','B','b' ? To have a base64 representation you need [s].pack('m') (and so #pack is used for 'u','m','M' to obtain the specified format), but for 'H','h','B','b' you need s.unpack(directive). I think the latter makes more sense when compared to other types such as 'l', in which #unpack is used to obtain the desired format. -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/