Ruby: Doing binary operations on bitstrings

Question

I have an array of long(45) character bitstrings, that basically represent the boolean state of a bunch of attributes. I need to perform OR and AND operations on these strings and get back the resulting binary string. ex:

    a = "100"
    b = "101"

I now need to compute:

    a_or_b  = "101"
    a_and_b = "100"

Is there efficient anyway for me to do this? Can I use the bitwise operators somehow?

Green Su · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-13 08:12:51Z

2

You have Integer#to_s(base) and String.to_i(base) available to you.

a_and_b = (a.to_i(2) & b.to_i(2)).to_s(2)

a_or_b = (a.to_i(2) | b.to_i(2)).to_s(2)

answered May 13, 2014 at 8:12

Green Su

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3 Comments

lewstherin Over a year ago

Awesome, thanks! I am a bit of a noob in this area, so forgive me if this is stupid. But will this be faster than looping? Are the to binary and back to string operations expensive?

Green Su Over a year ago

I do not think loop would be faster. As the Ruby basic apis are implemented in C, which should be faster than Ruby code itself.

lewstherin Over a year ago

Great, thank you. I did some quick benchmarking and the results were stunning. For 50,000 iters, the binary operations took 0.11 secs and the same thing with a ruby loop took 2.71 seconds.

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