I'm not a whiz at pack and unpack, so I'm not sure how to right justify and left justify yet (I left the camel book at work), but at least it handles spaces (the capital 'A' means ascii (or text?) , and pad with spaces).

Start with this, and see how it goes...

$template = "A5 A4";

$field1 = "Hello";
$field2 = "    ";
$str = pack ($template,$field1,$field);
print "my string is <$str>\n";
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