Question

This is the general goal I am trying to achieve:

My VB.NET program will generate some Lists that may contain booleans, integers, strings, or more lists. I want the program to output a “file” which basically contains such data. It is important that the file cannot be read by humans Okay actually, fine, human-readable data wouldn’t be bad.

Afterward, I want my Ruby program to take such file and read the contents. The Lists become arrays, and integers, booleans and strings are read alright with Ruby. I just want to be able to read the file, I might not need to write it using Ruby.

Answer 1

In .Net you’d use a BinaryWriter, if you’re using IronRuby you’d then use a BinaryReader. If you’re not using IronRuby, then perhaps…

contents = open(path_to_binary_file, “rb”) {|io| io.read }

Why do you not want it to be human readable? I hope it’s not for security reasons…