I am currently porting a perl project to ruby and all has been going fine until I reached this pack statement.
$move .= pack('W', int($length));
I understand what it's trying to do, but I can't find any documentation on the 'W' option for perls pack method. So it is a bit hard to find a suitable replacement for ruby.
What this statement does is takes the integer, and converts it to a big endian hex format (I believe).
For example the integer 290 is converted to 0x122, and is then stored as "2201" in the variable $move
Although I cannot confirm that because I can't find documentation on 'W' although it would make sense based on what the rest of the project is doing.
Does anyone know a ruby replacement method that would do the same?
edit: As per a comment below I have found it with some help.
W An unsigned char value (can be greater than 255).
Since the format's introduction in 5.10, pack says:
W An unsigned char value (can be greater than 255).
For example, the following are equivalent:
pack('W', 0x2660)chr(0x2660)"\x{2660}"For all values of $i, length(pack('W', $i)) is one.
What's the size of a character (string element) in Ruby? Are they 8 bits like C, or larger like Java (16) and Perl (32 or 64)?
If they are limited to 8 bits, there is no direct equivalent of that code in Ruby. You'll need to use an array instead of a string.
If Ruby's character are wide enough to contain the numbers in question (e.g. 290), then a look through the Ruby docs reveals the following:
i.chr