How to get raw (un-decoded) byte arrays from a TCPSocket in Ruby

Question

I've been using ruby to setup a TCPSocket with a server and I've hit a snag. When receiving data from the socket (with either a socket.gets or a socket.recv ) I get something like this:

x00\x03!\xB2\x00\x00*\xCF

What I get when I capture the packets in Wireshark is

x00\x03\x21\xB2\x00\x00\x2a\xCF

As you can see, the \\x21 is decoded into the ASCII equivalent ! and the \\x2a is decoded into the ASCII equivalent * .

I've checked and googled a ton of times and have not yet found a solution to get the raw, un-decoded information. I have a parser built that will search for the relevant data from the stream and grab what I need, but I don't want to have to waste time re-encoding it before I have to decode it. Or, I incorporate ASCII into my parser, but that would be a huge pain. There is a lot of bytes in this stream and to re-encode them all would be time consuming. I also see that netcat returns the same output from the TCP stream that ruby does. I could not figure out how to get netcat to output the un-decoded byte arrays either.

Code:

require 'socket'
s = TCPSocket.new "10.0.0.3", 27000

while true do
  item = s.recv(5000)
  puts item
  puts item.inspect
end

This is my first foray into socket programming, so I apologize if I missed something very obvious.

Answer 1

I kind of invented the problem in my head, I am dumb.

To solve this, all you need to do is take the string of TCP information and call unpack("H*") on it like this:

"x00\x03!\xB2\x00\x00*\xCF".unpack("H*")
=> ["7830300321b200002acf"]

Which is exactly like x00\\x03\\x21\\xB2\\x00\\x00\\x2a\\xCF

Now I just need to adjust my parser to split it or deal with the big clump of byte arrays

More info on unpack