Fun with Binary & Hex in Ruby!

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While I haven't written a coding post in three months, I swear I do code every day. Recently, I started taking night classes again. This semester, I'm taking Computer Architecture and Data Structures with Java. My first project in Computer Architecture was to build a MIPS disassembler. I decided to use Ruby, which ended up bringing up some unique issues, mostly because Ruby does not have a short variable type within it's Numeric class. In Java, the short type is a 16-bit signed two's complement integer. Ruby does not use primitive types because everything has to be an object. No short object == no short type. Also, while binary and hexadecimal numbers can be converted easily to decimal in Ruby, they are initially strings. What does this mean? It means that in addition to the other parts of the translate, I also had to convert from hex to binary and from binary to signed decimal. I'll probably share all of my code in the future, but for now, here's a walkthrough of those two functions:

Translating to binary

This was pretty simple. I just had to use sprintf and it immediately converted the hexadecimal numbers into binary. Only one hitch! I needed the leading zeros (if there were any), so I had to use rjust to make sure it was a 32 bit binary by padding it to the left with 0s.

# takes an array of hex and returns an array of binary
# (32bit, including leading zeros)
def translate_to_binary(array_of_hex)
  array_of_binary = []
  array_of_hex.each do |num|
    array_of_binary << sprintf("%b", num).rjust(32, '0')
  end
  array_of_binary
end

Converting to a signed integer

Since I couldn't just cast as a short, I had to use two's complement. With two's complement, I knew that if the integer version of the binary was greater than 2^15, then it was actually a negative number. Otherwise, it was correct as is.

def convert_to_signed_binary(binary)
  binary_int = binary.to_i(2)
  if binary_int >= 2**15
    return binary_int - 2**16
  else
    return binary_int
  end
end

Boom! I hope this helps someone else who might've had the same trouble I did at first. I'll go into the program in full after my whole class has actually submitted theirs. ðŸ˜›