= BinData is a declarative way to read and write structured binary data.

This release makes BinData compatible with ruby 1.9.2. There are some performance improvements to both reduce memory and increase execution speed.

Version 1.3.0 is around the corner. This will feature new syntactic sugar to make BinData declarations even easier to read.

If you use BinData and have any comments, suggestions or questions, feel free to email me.

== What is BinData?

Do you ever find yourself writing code like this?

io = File.open(...)
len = io.read(2).unpack("v")
name = io.read(len)
width, height = io.read(8).unpack("VV")
puts "Rectangle #{name} is #{width} x #{height}"

It's ugly, violates DRY and feels like you're writing Perl, not Ruby.

Here's how you'd write the above using BinData.

class Rectangle < BinData::Record
. endian :little
. uint16 :len
. string :name, :read_length => :len
. uint32 :width
. uint32 :height
end

io = File.open(...)
r = Rectangle.read(io)
puts "Rectangle #{r.name} is #{r.width} x #{r.height}"

BinData supports all the data types you expect, including; arbitrarily sized/signed/endian integers, floats, bitstrings, strings, null terminated strings, dependent fields, arrays, choices, nested structures, and user defined structures.