http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=11127252

GrandFather has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a binary file (think ELF or Windows PE) that includes fields that may be long (32 bit) or quad (64) bit and little or big endien depending on the specific file. The script may be running on a big or little endian machine with a Perl built for 32 or 64 bits. I want to unpack the fields for later use that will include display using printf and file operations using read and seek so I need to convert from file representation to the running Perl's native representation for those fields. The following sample code does that, but the pack 'L2' ...; unpack 'Q' feels a bit clunky. Can it be tidied up?

use warnings; use strict; use Config; use Fcntl; printf "Perl $^V %s ivsize %d byteorder %d\n", $Config{archname}, $Config{ivsize}, $Config{byteorder}; # Generate a "binary file" with a string of bytes likely to show up is +sues in # decoding my $binary = "\x91\x34\x33\x90\x81\x32\x31\x80"; for my $fileLE (0, 1) { my $fromFile = $fileLE ? 'V4' : 'N4'; open my $inFH, '<:raw', \$binary; read $inFH, my $raw1, 4; read $inFH, my $raw2, 4; my $long1 = unpack $fromFile, $raw1; my $long2 = unpack $fromFile, $raw2; my $packed = pack "L2", $fileLE ? ($long1, $long2) : ($long2, $lon +g1); my $longlong = unpack 'Q', $packed; printf "%s: %016x\n", ($fileLE ? "LE" : "BE"), $longlong; }

A 32 bit Windows build prints:

Perl v5.32.0 MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-64int ivsize 8 byteorder 1234567 +8 BE: 9134339081323180 LE: 8031328190333491

A nice sanity check would be to run the code on a big endian system and see that the numbers generated are the same. Of course the long long processing will come unstuck where ivsize < 8.

Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond