Gentlemonks,

At $work, a test suite has these three different methods of building a string sprinkled throughout it. Since the tests are for utf8 handling, I'm assuming that these are designed to produce a string with particular bytes in them without alerting Perl to their UTF-8 nature. The methods are:

  1. The double quoted string of \x escapes. 
    "\x{aa}\x{42}\x{fe}"

    [download]
  2. Concatenation of chr(hex). 
    ( chr(hex('AA')) . chr(hex('42')) . chr(hex('FE')) )

    [download]
  3. packed hex numbers 
    pack( "C*", 0xaa, 0x42, 0xfe )

    [download]

Is any of these methods preferable over the others? Is there any difference between them? Is there a way still better than any of them?

In reply to Building binary strings. by kyle

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