Equivalent of String#setbyte and String#getbyte in ruby 1.8

Question

Trying to get the aerospike ruby client to work under 1.8

What is the equivalent of these calls in ruby 1.8 ?

https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-client-ruby/blob/master/lib/aerospike/utils/buffer.rb#L65

https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-client-ruby/blob/master/lib/aerospike/utils/buffer.rb#L95

Answer 1

IIRC, Ruby 1.8 strings are, for all intents and purposes, what 1.9 would treat as ASCII-8BIT. As such, String#[] and String#[]= are the way to proceed as already suggested in the comments. (The same functions in 1.9 will target a potentially multibyte character at a certain offset, rather than a byte.)

For a more complete discussion on Ruby M17N and how strings changed in Ruby 1.9, see:

• http://yokolet.blogspot.com/2009/07/design-and-implementation-of-ruby-m17n.html
• http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/05/ruby-1-9-encodings-a-primer-and-the-solution-for-rails/

Answer 2

Rather than rely on how a particular version of Ruby processes bytes/chars/strings, instead use the pack and unpack methods. They are always available and behave consistently.

For your use, unpack the data into an array, then you can use normal Array slicing to change the bytes in question, then pack everything back into the byte-stream.