A system I'm building needs to convert non-negative Ruby integers into shortest-possible UTF-8 string values. The only requirement on the strings is that their lexicographic order be identical to the natural order on integers.

What's the best Ruby way to do this?

We can assume the integers are 32 bits and the sign bit is 0. This is successful:

(i >> 24).chr + ((i >> 16) & 0xff).chr + ((i >> 8) & 0xff).chr + (i & 0xff).chr

But it appears to be 1) garbage-intense and 2) ugly. I've also looked at pack solutions, but these don't seem portable due to byte order.

FWIW, the application is Redis hash field names. Building keys may be a performance bottleneck, but probably not. This question is mostly about the "Ruby way".