I'm trying to read a stream of bytes, sent over http (yes), and read specific bytes out of it. I'm finding, incredulously, that I don't know how to determine the integer value of a byte. Some context:

   my $sock = Net::HTTP->new(Host => "server.com") || die $@;
   $sock->write_request(GET => "bytestream") or die $@;
   $sock->read_response_headers( );  #i don't need these
   while(1){
      $s->recv($buf, $size); 
      my $n = length($buf);
      # oh.. i feel like reading byte #4 today.
      next if $n < 4;  # i don't want to talk about this case, ok?
      my $byte = bytes::substr($buf, 4, 1, undef); 
           #remove it from the stream too
      print $byte; #not looking like an integer.

      $byte *= 16; #yields a warning:
                   # Argument "x" isn't numeric ...etc
                   #  where "x" is some crazy character
   }
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for the more curious, I'm attempting to implement an icecast stream recorder, the stream format is explained here: http://www.smackfu.com/stuff/programming/shoutcast.html
i'm storing the metaint from the headers, just not in my example, and yes the "byte" i'm trying to read is that meta length byte - my next question will be how to convert the meta data (string of bytes) into a character string. then writing to disk (and prefiltering) only the mpg frames, none of the metadata.

maybe somebody will recommend other solutions to reimplementing the wheel, which I'm open to, but my requirements are highly specific and I haven't found anything that can meet them all, so here we are.