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Postings from September 2000
On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Michael G Schwern wrote: > On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 12:32:08PM -0400, Sam Tregar wrote: > > If I grok'd the bastards, I'd write the explaination myself. If you grok'd the bastards I bet you'd realize how useless such an explanation would be. The chief reason for using pack/unpack is to deal with external binary formats. Why would you want a description that didn't talk about external binary formats? > > Maybe you don't get to know how good it is until you need it? > > I'm sure there are many times when pack should have been used but it > got hacked together with something else. The prime example is > fixed-width data parsing. Most people reach for substr() or a regex, > but the best solution (as pointed out in perlfaq5) is pack. Yet it > still remains obtuse and I'm largely cargo-culting when I use it. I think you're talking about unpack() here, which I've only used once. I think unpack() is usually replaceable by substr() or regexes. Contrast that with pack() for which no equivalent replacement is possible, as far as I know. -samThread Previous | Thread Next