File Packing Ideas

ruby-talk
1

Why am I still getting random newlines using CGI.escape? Is there a certain
maximum number of characters this module can handle?

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-----Original Message-----
From: Nikodemus Siivola [mailto:tsiivola@cc.hut.fi]
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 12:15 PM
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: Re: File Packing Ideas

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Vera, Michael wrote:

I am looking for help to solve this problem I have. I need to read in a
file, and convert it into a single line string with no characters readable
in it, (such as \n, \t, etc.) so that it can be sent over a socket
connection and reconverted on the other side.

The CGI class solves this problem for you: URL’s need to be escaped as
well.

irb(main):001:0> require ‘cgi’
true
irb(main):002:0> str = “\n\f\r\b”
“\n\f\r\010”
irb(main):003:0> str2 = CGI.escape str
“%0A%0C%0D%08”
irb(main):004:0> str == CGI.unescape(str2)
true
irb(main):005:0>

– Nikodemus

2

  1. What is your dataset? Strings of arbitary ASCII characters? How long?
    Hundreds bytes or gigabytes?

  2. What kind of format do you want to pack them to? Do you just need to get
    rid of newlines, or do you need to get rid of all non-alphanumeric
    characters, or what?

– Nikodemus

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On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Vera, Michael wrote:

Why am I still getting random newlines using CGI.escape? Is there a certain
maximum number of characters this module can handle?