Christophe Mckeon wrote:
> hi,
> 
> is there some character or sequence of characters which is guaranteed
> *not* to occur in a string produced by Marshal.dump on some arbitrary
> object hierarchy.

Think not. If you do:

result = Marshal.dump(some_sequence_of_characters)

then the characters of the string some_sequence_of_characters are going 
to be embedded in the result string.

For example:

irb(main):001:0> Marshal.dump("1234")
=> "\004\b\"\t1234"
irb(main):002:0> Marshal.dump("\001\002\003\004")
=> "\004\b\"\t\001\002\003\004"

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