Ruby: Binary String to IO
binary, bson, mongodb, mongoid, ruby
Solution
You could possibly use a `StringIO` for this:
require 'stringio'
io = StringIO.new(binary_data)
book = Spreadsheet.open(io)
Problem
I have a string of binary data and I need it as an IO object. So I tried this: ``` r, w = IO.pipe() w << data ``` But it fails with this error: ``` Encoding::UndefinedConversionError ("\xD0" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8) ``` Why is it trying to convert to UTF-8 in the first place? is there a way to force the IO::pipe method to a binary mode? More details: I'm trying to read binary data (which is an Excel file) from MongoDB using the Mongoid driver, and then convert it to an IO object in order to use the Spreadsheet gem to read it. Spreadsheet#open expects either a file path or an IO object. Here's how my file document looks: ``` class ImportedFile include Mongoid::Document field :file_name, type: String field :binary_content, type: Moped::BSON::Binary end ``` Here's how I saved the binary data in the first place: ``` imported_file = ImportedFile.new imported_file.file_name = uploaded_file.original_filename imported_file.binary_content = Moped::BSON::Binary.new(:generic, uploaded_file.read) imported_file.save ``` And here's how I'm trying to read it (doesn't work): ``` imported_file = ImportedFile.find(file_id) r, w = IO.pipe() w << imported_file.binary_content.data book = Spreadsheet.open r ```