Ruby Programming/Reference/Objects/Marshal

Marshal The Marshal class is used for serializing and de-serializing objects to disk: ex serialized = Marshal.dump(['an', 'array', 'of', 'strings']) unserialized = Marshal.restore(serialized) With 1.9, each dump also includes an encoding, so you *must* use Marshal's stream read feature if you wish to read it from an IO object, like a file. a = File.open("serialized_data", "w") a.write Marshal.dump(33) b = File.open("serialized_data", "r") unserialized = Marshal.restore(b) b.close