I don't have anything to add to Joel's excellent reply, but one thing caught my eye: On 30.06.2009 00:08, Greg Chambers wrote: > My main concern is that the documentation is VERY specific. That sounds odd to me. Most of the time people complain that there is no documentation or that it's inaccurate. Apparently you got documentation leaving no questions and are concerned. This is the best that could happen to you in this situation. Why are you concerned? Kind regards robert PS: One additional heads up: when encoding and decoding numbers pay special attention to byte ordering (big endian, little endian). -- remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/