Ooops - I thought that U returned a Unicode string and not single items, so my answer is wrong. You should go with GrandFather's approach and move the 20 items out of the array later:

my @items = unpack "...", $string;
my @first = splice @items, 0, 20;

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In reply to Re^5: help needed in storing the return values of unpack by Corion
in thread help needed in storing the return values of unpack by Anonymous Monk

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