Cleaned up the layout quite a bit to make Gemifying and including into Rails 3 less painful. Some steps to 1.9 compatibility

lib/net/ldap/core_ext/string.rb

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+module Net
+  class LDAP
+    module Extensions
+      module String
+        #
+        # to_ber
+        # A universal octet-string is tag number 4,
+        # but others are possible depending on the context, so we
+        # let the caller give us one.
+        # The preferred way to do this in user code is via to_ber_application_sring
+        # and to_ber_contextspecific.
+        #
+        def to_ber code = 4
+          [code].pack('C') + length.to_ber_length_encoding + self
+        end
+
+        #
+        # to_ber_application_string
+        #
+        def to_ber_application_string code
+          to_ber( 0x40 + code )
+        end
+
+        #
+        # to_ber_contextspecific
+        #
+        def to_ber_contextspecific code
+          to_ber( 0x80 + code )
+        end
+        
+        def read_ber syntax=nil
+      	  StringIO.new(self).read_ber(syntax)
+        end
+          
+        def read_ber! syntax=nil
+      	  obj,n_consumed = read_ber_from_string(self, syntax)
+      	  if n_consumed
+      	    self.slice!(0...n_consumed)
+      	    obj
+      	  else
+      	    nil
+      	  end
+        end
+        
+      end
+    end
+  end
+end