String contains NUL bytes - ruby

Question

I'm trying to decode this file that is in IBM437 into readable UTF I'm at the point where I think I've almost got it but I'm getting an ArgumentError where the string contains nul bytes, I'm aware of how to gsub out nul bytes using:
.gsub("\u0000", '') however I can't figure out where to gsub the bytes out.
Here's the source:
def gather_info
file = './lib/SETI_message.txt'
File.read(file).each_line do |gather|
packed = [gather].pack('b*')
ec = Encoding::Converter.new(packed, 'utf-8')
encoding_forced = packed.encode(ec)
File.open('packed.txt', 'a+'){ |s| s.puts(encoding_forced.gsub("\u0000", '')) }
end
end
gather_info
And here's the file
Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here?

Answer 1

The following works for me :
file = File.read('SETI.txt')
packed = file.scan(/......../).map{|s| s.to_i(2)}.pack('U*')
File.write('packed.txt', packed)
Let's break file.scan(/......../).map{|s| s.to_i(2)}.pack('U*') down :
file.scan(/......../)
Here we break the huge string of 0s and 1s (the file) into an array of strings containing 8 characters each. It looks like that : ['00001111', '11110000', ...].
arr.map{|s| s.to_i(2)}
From step 1 we got an array of strings representing the different characters in binary notation. We can convert one of those strings (called s) by applying s.to_i(2) because the parameter '2' says to the method to_i to use base 2. So '00000011'.to_i(2) returns 3.
We apply this to all the characters by using map.
So we now have an array that looks like [98, 82, 49, 39, ...].
arr.pack('U*')
From step 2 we have an array of integers representing each a character. We can now use the pack method to transform our array of integers into a string. The parameter we use for pack is U to tell him that the integers are in fact UTF-8 characters.