I'm guessing they're octal by some weird default. I was able to make similar output making up a dummy file using that presumption (entering his numbers using hexl-mode in emacs) that produced similar output on OS X with the default /usr/bin/hexdump. I'm partial to od -xa myself.

$ hexdump -c foo
0000000  \0  \0 001 257  \n 344  \0 003  \0  \0  \0   s  \0 006 002 26
+7
0000010
$ od -xa foo
0000000      0000    af01    e40a    0300    0000    7300    0600    b
+702
         nul nul soh  af  nl  e4 nul etx nul nul nul   s nul ack stx  
+b7
0000020
[download]

Edit: Derp, his \a should of course be 0x07 not \n / 0x0a. I need moar caffeine . . .

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.