pack and unpack

But more than any other piece of Perl, the *only* way to understand pack & unpack, is to get yourself a REPL and sit and play.
— BrowserUk in Re^5: How do unpack templates work

Tutorials

• perlpacktut
• Pack/Unpack Tutorial (aka How the System Stores Data)

Threads

• Mystery! Logical explanation?
• Re^3: Best technique to code/decode binary data for inter-machine communication?
• How to easily convert the pack function from little endian to big endian
• String to hex
• Missing byte using unpack, pack, read(in terms of bytes)
• How do unpack templates work
• Handling Hex data with Dynamic unpack
• Print hex data in ASCII format as is
• Unpacking variable length bit fields
• What are pack/unpack used for?
• Re: Why is the size even bigger after pack?
• Convert to Hexadecimal
• Function to produce formatted ord values of a string
• ActivePerl on Win32 storing integers as strings?
• Fast - Compact That String
• Re: decimal to binary
• Run length encode a bit vector
• A way to pack string into another light weight structure
• pack and unpack trouble
• Extracting Bit Fields (Again)
• generating an encoded text
• Index a file with pack for fast access
• Data structures benchmark(pack vs. arrays vs. hashes vs. strings)
• Fast Way to Split String in to Chunk of Equal Length
• comparison of packed signed integers
• Just another unpack hacker
• A little win
• 3-byte representation
• unpacking mixed ascii & utf16 null termed strings
• Simple perl encoder
• packing into a byte token

Related functions

• ord
• chr
• sprintf

REPL

perl -MDevel::REPL -e "Devel::REPL->new->run"
[download]