• If you are working with fixed length data, you can indicate the beginning with a specific character, e.g. 0xc0, and then you know you must assumble $length{0xc0} bytes.
• If you are not dealing with truly binary data (e.g. all 8 bit values are possible), you can take a character that is not part of the alphabet used, and then bracket the data with that, e.g. 0xf0 . $foo_data . 0xf0
• If you are dealing with truly binary data, and/or variable length data, the only true way to do it right is encode the length at the begin of the packet

Not telling you much you don't know, eh? I guess you can take this as being a confirmation of what you already suspect.

Be that as it may, as far as modules are concerned, this is dreadfully easy to put together with a bit of encoding and decoding via pack/unpack.

g r i n d e r