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Postings from September 2000
On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, Dave Storrs wrote: > "Unpack takes binary data in some particular format and > disassembles it, assigning various pieces of it to variables according to > formatting that you supply. Pack does the opposite, using your supplied > formatting to crunch Perl scalar variables into binary data that is > represented in some specific way. The binary data used by (un)pack will > belong to exactly one type of C numeric variable, meaning that it will be > limited in what kinds of numbers it can store and how it will represent > them." > > Is this definition completely off-base? You were doing fine until the last sentence. I'm not 100% sure what it means but I'm pretty sure its not right. pack() and unpack() do a lot more than just C numerics - they do Unicode, network byte ordering, hex strings, simple compression and null packing. I wouldn't suggest that every Perl geek should know pack() and unpack(). Still, when you need it you'll be glad its there. -samThread Previous | Thread Next