Is there some way to skip the map() or chr() functions?

Why would you want to skip them? Any why them but not join? Seems rather arbitrary.

You'll need chr however you go about this and it is not a difficult fuction to understand. map can be avoided but you'll still need some sort of iterative/looping structure. eg:

perl -e 'print chr for 0xdf .. 0x0101, 0xa';
[download]

That's with *nix EOL.