in-memory implementation of IO class

[Nathan Beyer]

Is there an implementation of the IO class that operates on in-memory
byte arrays (or other data structure)? I haven't seen anything in the
core/stdlib.

 

[James Gray]

Is there an implementation of the IO class that operates on in-memory
byte arrays (or other data structure)? I haven't seen anything in the
core/stdlib.

Yes, see the standard StringIO library.

James Edward Gray II

 

[Nathan Beyer]

Yes, see the standard StringIO library.

James Edward Gray II

Excuse my ignorance -- I'm just getting into Ruby, but isn't the
StringIO for working with character data? Is there no distinction
between characters and bytes? I was assuming that StringIO and String
would cause some form of character encoding/decoding processing to
kick in.

Thanks
- Nathan

 

[pharrington]

Excuse my ignorance -- I'm just getting into Ruby, but isn't the
StringIO for working with character data? Is there no distinction
between characters and bytes? I was assuming that StringIO and String
would cause some form of character encoding/decoding processing to
kick in.

Thanks
- Nathan

I would think this is what the #bytes, #each_byte, #readbyte, etc
methods are for. But I've never actually used StringIO *myself*, so I
can't say for sure. (However, the fact that Rack and ActionPack both
use StringIO for processing requests says its safe for raw data)

 

[Eric Hodel]

Excuse my ignorance -- I'm just getting into Ruby, but isn't the
StringIO for working with character data? Is there no distinction
between characters and bytes? I was assuming that StringIO and String
would cause some form of character encoding/decoding processing to
kick in.

In ruby 1.8 no. In ruby 1.9 set the encoding to binary.