Carlos wrote:
> Agnieszka Figiel wrote:
> 
>> Hello!
>>
>> How would you go about representing the byte type in Ruby? I have a 
>> task where I neeed to be writing and reading bytes from a tcp socket - 
>> so for instance I might want to send/receive an integer which is 1 
>> byte long, other times 4 bytes. in Java you can do that easily with 
>> the byte type, so far I have no good idea how to do this in Ruby.
> 
> Use Array#pack to put your bytes/integers/etc in a string. Send and 
> receive strings. Use String#unpack to extract bytes/integers/etc from 
> the string.

And you might want to check out bit-struct for a more object-oriented 
and readable wrapper around pack and unpack:

http://redshift.sourceforge.net/bit-struct/

-- 
        vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407