Re^2: Behaviour of unpack() with the Z template

the Z5 pattern makes perl read the first five bytes and strip away everything after the first null byte

I agree with your analysis but the word "after" here and in the documentation is where I see a problem. It implies that only text that follows the null will be stripped, not the null itself. The behaviour makes sense, the description is, I think, wrong.

Cheers,

JohnGG

Comment on Re^2: Behaviour of unpack() with the Z template

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Re^3: Behaviour of unpack() with the Z template by Eily (Monsignor) on Feb 08, 2017 at 15:10 UTC
That was precisely my point, that the null byte is not ignored like the other characters after it. It's part of the data when encoded in the format "null-terminated string", but not part of the value. It doesn't appear in the output value because it's a format detail, the same way the byte order doesn't appear after decoding a little endian or big endian integer value. But that's nitpicking, this would make the documentation misleading rather than plain wrong, which should also be avoided in a documentation. I think your phrasing returns everything up to but not including the first null. is fine.	[reply]

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Re^3: Behaviour of unpack() with the Z template
by Eily (Monsignor) on Feb 08, 2017 at 15:10 UTC

That was precisely my point, that the null byte is not ignored like the other characters after it. It's part of the data when encoded in the format "null-terminated string", but not part of the value. It doesn't appear in the output value because it's a format detail, the same way the byte order doesn't appear after decoding a little endian or big endian integer value.

But that's nitpicking, this would make the documentation misleading rather than plain wrong, which should also be avoided in a documentation. I think your phrasing returns everything up to but not including the first null. is fine.

[reply]