Patch (including test): http://gist.github.com/550458

The problem is that the code that determines the size includes the '-'.

I noticed the encoded length for BERT large bignums is not the same as the number of encoded bytes.

s = BERT.encode(-(0x01 << (256 * 8)))
s[2,4] # => "\000\000\001\004" (260)
s[7..-1].length # => 257

I know that none of the docs say that BERT supports Bignum, but I've noticed the following code:

http://github.com/mojombo/bert/blob/master/lib/bert/encode.rb#L25

AND

http://github.com/mojombo/bert/blob/master/lib/bert/encode.rb#L80

Just to prove it:

http://gist.github.com/219222

How do you feel about adding standard erlang term format compression to the bert spec?
< < 131, 80, UncompressedSize:32, ZlibCompressed/binary > >

That's all. :-)

http://github.com/mojombo/bert/blob/bf343621a31247a4b4e8bfc738115978d46515dc/Rakefile#L13

GitHub Gems shouldn't be relied upon anymore.

When I ran the following command

gem install bert

it gave the following error:

Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing bert:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    C:/Ruby193/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
creating Makefile

make  clean

make
generating decode-i386-mingw32.def
compiling decode.c
decode.c:3:24: fatal error: netinet/in.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
make: *** [decode.o] Error 1

make failed, exit code 2

Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/bert-1.1.6 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/extensions/x86-mingw32/1.9.1/bert-1.1.6/gem_make.out

I've implemented a super-simple (just one line of code) yet significant improvement in my fork:

http://github.com/bendiken/bert/commit/bc48200fda886f560d8611559f0233a280bb8faa

This makes BERT.encode rather more useful by allowing it to serialize any Ruby object as long as that object responds to the #to_bert method, which should return the BERT representation of the object.

This is a feature we very much need for RDF::BERT. With this patch, it now becomes possible to do things like the following:

require 'rdf'
require 'bert'

class RDF::Literal
  def to_bert
    BERT::Tuple[:literal, value.to_s, {:language => language.to_sym}]
  end
end

p BERT.encode(RDF::Literal("Hello!", :language => :en))

Much appreciated if this could be merged, it's a pretty trivial and non-invasive change but opens the door to new use cases such as the above.

Running into a bit of a perplexing problem with version 1.1.2:

>> BERT::Decode.new(StringIO.new("\203h\002d\000\005replyl\000\000\000\001a\001j"))
ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
    from (irb):2:in `initialize'
    from (irb):2:in `new'

I don't immediately see how that error's even possible given the code for BERT::Decode#initialize. Maybe there's a redefinition of the new class method going on elsewhere - didn't look.

The following works as expected:

>> BERT::Decode.decode("\203h\002d\000\005replyl\000\000\000\001a\001j")
=> t[:reply, [1]]

However, I'd prefer to be able to use BERT::Decode.new directly with an IO object, to avoid the StringIO creation overhead inside BERT::Decode.decode; important for decoding larger messages that can be read block by block, on demand, instead of copied around in full in memory a couple of times over.

I encounter this a lot within the ruby community, but this time it actually affects me. defining Object.t conflicts with rails' translate. t should at least be in a module, with a supported way to require bert without defining t.

I'll make a branch, but it'll just be a find/replace of t[ with BERT::Tuple[, so not worth a pull request.

http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html#id90685

Using the pure ruby decoder you can:

BERT::Decode.new(socket)

however using the C decoder I get:

BERT::Decode.new(socket)
ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
from (irb):3:in initialize' from (irb):3:innew'
from (irb):3

I'm trying to decode an erlang term but I'm getting this:

[3] pry(main)> BERT.decode('[{"x-max-hops",1},{"x-internal-purpose","federation"}]')
TypeError: Invalid magic value for BERT string
from /usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.1.0/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/bert-1.1.6/lib/bert/decoder.rb:8:in `decode'

Any ideas? - perhaps I'm not using the library right? - An example in the readme would be great, heh