BitArray: Pure Ruby bit-array/bitfield library

A simple, pure-Ruby 'bit field' object. Works well for Bloom filters (the use case for which I originally wrote it, although there are numerous good libraries for that task now).

Despite its age, BitArray has been updated to work within a typical, modern Ruby environment, but is only 'mildly' maintained.

Installation

bundle add bitarray

Examples

To use:

require 'bitarray'

Create a bit array 1000 bits wide:

ba = BitArray.new(1000)

Setting and reading bits:

ba[100] = 1
ba[100]
#=> 1

ba[100] = 0
ba[100]
#=> 0

More:

ba = BitArray.new(20)
[1,3,5,9,11,13,15].each { |i| ba[i] = 1 }
ba.to_s
#=> "01010100010101010000"
ba.total_set
#=> 7

Initializing BitArray with a custom field value:

ba = BitArray.new(16, ["0000111111110000"].pack('B*'))
ba.to_s # "1111000000001111"

BitArray by default stores the bits in reverse order for each byte. If for example, you are initializing BitArray with Redis raw value manipulated with setbit / getbit operations, you will need to tell BitArray to not reverse the bits in each byte using the reverse_byte: false option:

ba = BitArray.new(16, ["0000111111110000"].pack('B*'), reverse_byte: false)
ba.to_s # "0000111111110000"

History

• 1.3 in 2022 (cleanups and a minor perf tweak)
• 1.2 in 2018 (Added option to skip reverse the bits for each byte by @dalibor)
• 1.1 in 2018 (fixed a significant bug)
• 1.0 in 2017 (updated for modern Ruby, more efficient storage, and 10th birthday)
• 0.0.1 in 2012 (original v5 released on GitHub)
• v5 (added support for flags being on by default, instead of off)
• v4 (fixed bug where setting 0 bits to 0 caused a set to 1)
• v3 (supports dynamic bitwidths for array elements.. now doing 32 bit widths default)
• v2 (now uses 1 << y, rather than 2 ** y .. it's 21.8 times faster!)
• v1 (first release)

Thanks

Thanks to Michael Slade for encouraging me to update this library on its 10th birthday and for suggesting finally using String's getbyte and setbyte methods now that we're all on 1.9+ compatible implementations.

Further thanks to @tdeo, @JoshuaSP, @dalibor, @yegct and @m1lt0n for pull requests.

License

MIT licensed. Copyright 2007-2022 Peter Cooper.