Question

I have the following string that I would like to split on the \xA7 character.

\xFF$New Server\xA77\xA750

The problem being is that I can’t figure out how to tell Ruby to split it correctly on the \xA7 marker.

This is the error I get:

>> "\xFF$New Server\xA77\xA750".split("\xA7")
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
from (irb):26:in `split'
from (irb):26
from /Users/wedtm/.rbenv/versions/1.9.2-p290/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'

Answer 1

When forcing the encoding to BINARY you can work around that issue, though not sure if it’s the correct solution or breaks other things…

input = "\xFF$New Server\xA77\xA750".force_encoding('BINARY')
split = "\xA7".force_encoding('BINARY')
input.split(split) # => ["\xFF$New Server", "7", "50"]