Then you need to unpack all 3, you can't unpack three variables at once AFAIK. The "A3 A3 A6" is a format for unpacking one variable, as Tux showed in the example. You could just used substrings,

$ans_rid = substr($ans_rid, 0, 3);
$ans_qcn = substr($ans_qcn, 0, 3);
$ans_loc = substr($ans_loc, 0, 6);
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..or make new variables for each substr() leaving the original variable intact.