unpack does what the documentation says it does: it extracts six characters into a string.

If you want to get rid of the whitespace padding, you can just use it in numerical context: 

$ perl -wle 'print ">", 0+"   123";'
>123

[download]

Note that a blank is nothing special to unpack.

Perl 6 in German

In reply to Re: pack/unpack left padding by moritz
in thread pack/unpack left padding by Anonymous Monk

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