hail oh reverend gurus, a lowly initiate seeks advice at your everlasting fountain of knowledge. :)

there's a task of reading binary data from a file, parsing it and printing it out in csv text file. there are two known formats of binary file, both documented. in perspective, there may be more formats so i would like to keep parsing code as generalized as possible. the holy unpack is good but there's a catch (as always). the data record format is about that:

• x fields of 4-byte unsigned integers
• y fields of 2-byte integers, some signed and some unsigned
• a curious 9-bit wide bit string contained in 2-byte short (some flag values)
• z fields of 1-byte integers, unsigned
• n fields of fixed length null-terminated ASCII strings

the catch itself is that all the data is little-endian but the platform used to run a software producing such binary data is big-endian (sparc64). the conversion script should run on the sparc.

so there's my humble question: is there any way to do the parsing elegantly? i did the parsing quick and dirty way but i know that's a sin. my view of heaven for this case is the holy unpack to be able to parse the whole record in one pass. i tried to meditate on perlpacktut for three days but nothing comes to my mind short of divine intervention in form of some signed "v" template and that doesn't solve bit-string matter in which every bit is a separate field...

oh, and another complication: the system that produces the binary data is proprietary and it's using solaris 9 as a platform so it would be best to avoid any modules not built in perl 5.6.1 that is already there. no cc. :( ideally it should be a small beautiful self-containing perl hack but... i feel i have reached the limit of my humble perl knowledge so i ask your advice, oh gurus!

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