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Postings from May 2013
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Steffen Mueller <mail@steffen-mueller.net> wrote: > [side-track] > > On 05/01/2013 06:44 PM, demerphq wrote: >> >> My understanding of pack()s original intention was to allow one to >> construct C structures in Perl. As such introduces a change which >> basically means one cannot safely put a string into a C structure >> without the possibility of the entire structure being corrupted by >> doing so doesn't make sense. > > > In all fairness, if you use pack to do that, you'll be writing VERY > unportable code due to alignment, padding and friends. But don't listen to > me: Have a look at the docs for Convert::Binary::C. Marcus knows a lot > better than I do. > > --Steffen For what it's worth, I often use pack/unpack when I'm working with network protocols. The endianness and encoding are well defined and may differ from the architecture of the system I'm working on. The main example I can think of was talking from a SPARC/Solaris or Intel/linux host to a Windows service, which meant not only did it it have to pay attention to endianness for the encoded length fields, it had to convert encoded text data from UTF-16 to UTF-8 as well.Thread Previous | Thread Next