Read binary file as string in Ruby

Question

I need an easy way to take a tar file and convert it into a string  and vice versa   Is there a way to do this in Ruby  My best attempt was this   file   File open  path-to-file tar gz   contents      file each   line    contents  lt  lt  line     I thought that would be enough to convert it to a string  but then when I try to write it back out like this     newFile   File open  test tar gz    w   newFile write contents    It isn t the same file  Doing ls -l shows the files are of different sizes  although they are pretty close  and opening the file reveals most of the contents intact   Is there a small mistake I m making or an entirely different  but workable  way to accomplish this

User · Answer

To avoid leaving the file open  it is best to pass a block to File open   This way  the file will be closed after the block executes   contents   File open  path-to-file tar gz    rb      f  f read

User · Answer

how about some open close safety   string   File open  file txt    rb      file  file read

User · Answer

If you need binary mode  you ll need to do it the hard way   s   File open filename   rb      f  f read     If not  shorter and sweeter is   s   IO read filename

User · Answer

Ruby have binary reading  data   IO binread path filaname    or if less than  Ruby 1 9 2  data   IO read path file

User · Answer

If you need binary mode  you ll need to do it the hard way   s   File open filename   rb      f  f read     If not  shorter and sweeter is   s   IO read filename

User · Answer

You can probably encode the tar file in Base64  Base 64 will give you a pure ASCII representation of the file that you can store in a plain text file  Then you can retrieve the tar file by decoding the text back   You do something like   require  base64   file contents   Base64 encode64 tar file data    Have look at the Base64 Rubydocs to get a better idea

User · Answer

on os x these are the same for me    could this maybe be extra   r  in windows   in any case you may be better of with   contents   File read  e tgz   newFile   File open  ee tgz    w   newFile write contents

User · Answer

First  you should open the file as a binary file  Then you can read the entire file in  in one command   file   File open  path-to-file tar gz    rb   contents   file read   That will get you the entire file in a string   After that  you probably want to file close  If you don   t do that  file won   t be closed until it is garbage-collected  so it would be a slight waste of system resources while it is open

User · Answer

If you can encode the tar file by Base64  and storing it in a plain text file  you can use   File open  my tar txt   each   line  puts line    or   File new  name file txt    r   each   line  puts line    to print each  text  line in the cmd

[ruby] Read binary file as string in Ruby

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