A bit of playing around lead me to this:

use re 'eval';

my $buffer =  "\04perl\03awk\01C";

while ($buffer =~ /\G(.)((??{".{".ord($1)."}"}))/gs) {
    print ord($1),$2,"\n";
}
[download]

Which seems to work ok. But its cryptic as all get out! (And uses a feature that perlre says is "highly experimental")

Yves / DeMerphq
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Software Engineering is Programming when you can't. -- E. W. Dijkstra (RIP)