Convert od output to binary

Recently, I got a block of standard od -c output and needed that in binary form. Here’s what I came up with:

!/bin/bash

while read -r p; do
     IFS=' ' read -r -a array <<< "$p"
     for index in "${!array[@]}"
     do
         if [ $index -ne 0 ]; then
             CH=${array[$index]}
             if [ ${#CH} -eq 3 ]; then
                 echo -en "\0${array[$index]}"
             elif [ ${#CH} -eq 2 ]; then
                 echo -en "${array[$index]}"
             elif [ ${#CH} == '|' ]; then
                 echo -en '|'
             else
                 echo -en "${array[$index]}"
             fi
         fi
     done
 done

It works pretty well unless there are blanks in the input stream which cannot (yet) be detected. Fortunately, in my case there weren’t any.