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 << 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?

Answer 1

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.