Currently in Perl 5.10.1 I succeeded in denting the wall with my head trying to perform a rather simple task. Starting with a simple ASCII string I need to

- find its length
- convert the length into 2 hex bytes.

my $string = "39860000NO00";
my $length = length($string);
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I need to convert the length (12) to the string "\x00\x0c"
any help will be greatly appreciated.