A fast Bitset implementation for Ruby. Available as the 'bitset' gem.

Usually you want to do this:

gem install bitset

But if you want the latest patches or want to work on it yourself, you may want to do this:

git clone git://github.com/tyler/bitset.git
cd bitset
rake build
gem install pkg/bitset-<version>.gem

You create a bitset like this:

>> Bitset.new(8)
=> 00000000

Here we created an 8-bit bitset. All bits are initialized to 0.

We can also create a bitset based on a string of ones and zeros.

>> Bitset.from_s('00010001')
=> 00010001

Obviously you can also set and clear bits...

>> bitset = Bitset.new(8)
=> 00000000

>> bitset[3] = true
=> 00010000

>> bitset[3] = false
=> 00000000

>> bitset.set(1, 3, 5, 7)
=> 01010101

>> bitset.clear(1, 5)
=> 00010001

The point of a bitset is to be, effectively, an array of single bits. It should support basic set and bitwise operations. So, let's look at a few of those.

>> a = Bitset.from_s('00001111')
=> 00001111

>> b = Bitset.from_s('01010101')
=> 01010101

>> a & b
=> 00000101

>> a | b
=> 01011111

>> b - a
=> 01010000

>> a ^ b
=> 01011010

>> ~a
=> 11110000

>> a.hamming(b)
=> 4

>> a.cardinality
=> 4

The best way to contribute is to fork the project on GitHub, make your changes, and send a pull request. This is always much appreciated. If you want to mess around with the version numbers, gemspec, or anything like that feel free... But do it in separate commits so I can easily ignore them.

See LICENSE.txt.