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Postings from May 2004
On perlmonks I just noticed http://www.perlmonks.com/index.pl?node_id=355284, which indeed seems you can't currently do with plain unpack and seems useful. So i thought it would be nice to have: "return current absolute position counted from the start of the string" At first look I thought that @ would be nice for this, but it already does something useful, namely moving to a given position and continue unpacking there. However, it's actually not documented what it does if you don't give it a numeric argument (the section on repeat counts defines the @ behaviour only for n and *). In that case it seems to go to fixed offset 1 (1 being the logical default for the repeaters of course), which doesn't seem particularly useful and can easily be done by using @1, and probably *IS* done that way by all existing code, so it would probably break no existing code to make @ without followup number in unpack return a position (and if something does break, well, they were using an undocumented feature...) The returned offset would be relative to the innermost () to keep it consistent. You probably wouldn't want to use an absolute position modifier inside a () anyways, so it doesn't really seem to lose anything. Opinions ?Thread Next