Ruby snippet that lets you see the actual bytes in a string.

readme.md

If you deal with a lot of binary data in Ruby, you'll want this snippet of code to add a String#hex_inspect method, because String#inspect makes it hard to see the actual bytes. Example usage:

binary_string = "\x0d\x0e\x00\x40"
binary_string.hex_inspect # => "\x0d\x0e\x00\x40" (good)
binary_string.inspect     # => "\r\x0E\x00@"  (bad)

hex_inspect.rb

class String
  def hex_inspect
    '"' + each_byte.map { |b| '\x%02x' % b }.join + '"'
  end
end