title: Ruby: What does unpack("C") actually do?
body: <p>From the docs, <code>unpack</code> does:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Decodes str (which may contain binary data) according to the format
    string, returning an array of each value extracted.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>And the <code>"C"</code> format means <code>8-bit unsigned (unsigned char)</code>.</p>
  
  <p>But what does this actually end up doing to the string I input? What does the result mean, and if I had to do it by hand, how would I go about doing that?</p>