in reply to Pack decimal possibility
There is a module, Convert::IBM390, that supports various conversion functions for data to/from a mainframe. One is packeb:
use Convert::IBM390 qw(packeb); my $comp3 = packeb( 'p4', 240 ); #77 A PIC S9(7) COMP-3. print $comp3; __END__ ~~output~~ 0x0000240c (of course, in binary)
It works well, and handles negative values.
Good luck. -c
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