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?

Answer 1

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)