Greetings fellows, I have a rather short question about "the fastest way to..". I have a string that kind of looks liks this: 
$string = "123".\0.
          "1".\0.\0.\0.
          "23".\0.\0;

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And so on, 4 chars for each value nullpadded. I have a procedure that fetches a value from the string based on a index but since I call that functions >60000 times I need the fastest way to get the value without the extra null-chars. Up to now I've tried two alternatives: 
(undef, $value) = unpack("a$index A4", $string);

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And: 
$value = substr($string, $index, 4);
$value =~ s/\0//g;

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But neither regexps nor unpack feels like the fastest way to do it. Is there any other way?

In reply to Null-stripping performance by qiau

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