Getting Errno::ENOMEM: Not enough space when 'getting' a page via Mechanize

Question

I'm currently trying to follow a tutorial on web scraping and have been receiving a ruby error message "Errno::ENOMEM: Not enough space". I've found a workaround from http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/1063 but I was wondering if there is a more permanent solution. I'm using ruby 1.8.7 (2010-12-23 patchlevel 330) [i386-mingw32] and I'm not in a position to update to a new version which I suspect would fix this problem. The issue only appears when I try to get larger pages.

Current Solution:

class String
  def to_2d_array(value)
    unpack("a#{value}"*((size/value)+((size%value>0)?1:0)))
  end
end

class << $stdout
  alias old_write write

  def write(a) 
    a.to_s.to_2d_array(1024).each{|little| old_write little}
  end
end

Answer 1

To fix my problem I've added:

class String
  def to_2d_array(value)
    unpack("a#{value}"*((size/value)+((size%value>0)?1:0)))
  end
end

class << $stdout
  alias old_write write

  def write(a) 
    a.to_s.to_2d_array(1024).each{|little| old_write little}
  end
end

To my irb.rb file after the last end.