pack/unpack specification

kapper has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

As some might recall, I'm working on a Java-Perl connection package.....

For this project, I'm very interested in the exact specifications for the format used by the pack, unpack functions... I would be very happy if some of you might be able to answer some of the following questions...

Is pack/unpack platform independant? endian independant?(can data packed on a 680x0 be unpacked on an x86 and so forth..)
Is pack/unpack at all standardized (... phew.. how do you spell that?).. in other words, can data packed using one perl engine be unpacked in another?
Is there a specification for the format used by pack/unpack?

Comment on pack/unpack specification

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Re: pack/unpack specification by c-era (Curate) on Jul 14, 2000 at 14:40 UTC
I have used pack/unpack several times in working with sockets. I've run the program on win32, solaris, linux, and bsd and not had any problems. Pack/unpack stores the information in an 8-bit binnary stream format. Any characters you pack will have their ascii values packed into one byte. The lengths are predefined (i.e. if you use "C" it pack/unpacks an 8-bit value). There could be a problem if a system thinks a "C" is 16-bit, but when you compile perl it does check for that.	[reply]
Re: pack/unpack specification by t0mas (Priest) on Jul 14, 2000 at 14:44 UTC
You can take a look at `perldoc perlport` for info on the portability of Numbers endianness and Width and other stuff. /brother t0mas	[reply] [d/l]
RE: pack/unpack specification by merlyn (Sage) on Jul 14, 2000 at 18:31 UTC
The "native" int and float format is endian and machine dependant. The "network" order and the inverse "vax" order are machine independant. Or at least, that's what I recall writing some years ago to make that camel-ish thingy. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re: pack/unpack specification by Aighearach (Initiate) on Jul 15, 2000 at 06:53 UTC
The documentation for pack() goes into this is some detail. You should read `perldoc -f pack`. For example, it says: The integer formats `s', `S', `i', `I', `l', and `L' are inherently non-portable between processors and operating systems because they obey the native byteorder and endianness. For example a 4-byte integer 0x12345678 (305419896 decimal) be ordered natively (arranged in and handled by the CPU registers) into bytes as 0x12 0x34 0x56 0x78 # little-endian 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12 # big-endian Basically, the Intel, Alpha, and VAX CPUs are little-endian, while everybody else, for example Motorola m68k/88k, PPC, Sparc, HP PA, Power, and Cray are big-endian. MIPS can be either: Digital used it in little-endian mode; SGI uses it in big- endian mode. [download] And it runs onward, into the sunset... Paris Sinclair \| 4a75737420416e6f74686572 pariss@efn.org \| 205065726c204861636b6572 I wear my Geek Code on my finger.	[reply] [d/l]