[MacRuby-devel] [MacRuby] #732: Ruby strings should have a to_data method

[MacRuby]

#732: Ruby strings should have a to_data method
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 Reporter:  me@…               |       Owner:  lsansonetti@…        
     Type:  enhancement        |      Status:  new                  
 Priority:  minor              |   Milestone:                       
Component:  MacRuby            |    Keywords:  string encoding      
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 From my mailing list post:

 =======
 Hello,

 I've been playing around with macruby a bunch and I hit a point of
 confusion. I basically did "....".pack("H*") which returns a ruby
 string. This string is an ASCII-8BIT encoded ruby string which is an
 alias for a Binary string (aka, it has no encoding). IMO, this should
 really be backed by an NSData class as opposed to an NSString class
 because it doesn't make much sense. In fact, it's pretty much
 impossible to get any useful information out of an ASCII-8BIT encoded
 ruby string from the objective-c side of things.

 To get around this, I did the following:

 class String
  def to_data
    return NSData.data unless length > 0

    bytes = self.bytes.to_a
    p = Pointer.new_with_type("char *", bytes.length)

    bytes.each_with_index do |char, i|
      p[i] = char
    end

    NSData.dataWithBytes(p, length:bytes.length)
  end
 end

 I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I thought I'd bring up
 the issue on the mailing list.
 =======

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Ticket URL: <http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/732>
MacRuby <http://macruby.org/>