thanks DamnDirtyApe, adrianh, sauoq and merlyn for the great advice. To give you an idea as for the basis of my question, I'm interesting in building a small tool that will convert hex content in a Snort IDS signature to a char value and, conversely, take a known attack string and quickly convert it to hex for signature creation. I'll probably use something like

print unpack "H*", "abc";
[download]

for the char to hex conversion.

cheers! -semio