Question

If I have a 5 bit binary string such as '01010', how can I convert it to its corresponding alphabetic character?

('00000'->'a' .. '11111'->'F')

I am doing this to compress a large set of boolean values to a string which can only contain the alphabetic characters [a-zA-Z].

Answer 1

letters = ('a'..'z').to_a + ('A'..'F').to_a
letters["00000".to_i(2)] # => 'a'
letters["11111".to_i(2)] # => 'F'
letters["01010".to_i(2)] # => 'k'