Binary Banner

Cross posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/abhinaba/archive/2006/12/04/binary-banner.aspx

BoingBoing has a story of a store that sells t-shirts with offensive messages spelled out in binary. I think its a nice way to generate email signature or web-page banner where you can really say offensive stuff and get away with it. I wrote the following code in Ruby which takes any word and spits out the binary ASCII representation.

ARGV.each do str
  def PrintBin(ch)
    mask = 0x80
    while mask != 0
      print (if (ch & mask) == 0 then "0" else "1" end)
      mask >>= 1
    end
  end

  str.each_byte do ch
    PrintBin ch
  end
  print "\n"
end

My Ruby is completely rusted so it took me some time to get this done. Later I tried writing the same code in C#. It took me over 3 times the LOC it took me to do it up in Ruby. I'm sure a experinced Ruby programmer can make this even more simpler and concise.

C:\MyStuff\Code\Ruby>BinaryBan.rb Krikkit
01001011011100100110100101101011011010110110100101110100

I have already started using it on my web-site