Hi Monks,

I'm trying to send an octal string to a receiving host.  The code example below shows the original ASCII values (in hex) of the command.  My script then loops over each two byte pair and converts the ASCII (hex values) to octal ready for sending to the host (and I agree that part is probably a bit long-winded).

Anyway, the problem is that if I try to send a simple string of octal digits (see $goodoct) it works fine, however the string returned from the sub convert is a literal string of characters and not interpreted as actual octal values.  I can tell this to be the case even without looking at the host side as the printed output (in Windows) for $octcommand shows "\2\61\70" etc whereas the output for $goodoct shows actual ASCII chars.

Its obviously a simple mistake somewhere on my part, but I'm having trouble seeing what the difference between the variable contents of $goodoct and $octcommd are.  All help appreciated! 
#!/usr/bin/perl
#

$hexcommand="02313832300030010000c000003030353130303038313032343034343
+83236383331343135353430303030303030303030343135353430303003";

convert($hexcommand);

print "DERRIVED OCTAL\n$octcommand\n\n";
$goodoct="\2\61\70\62\60\0\60\1\0\0\300\0\0\60\60\65\61\60\60\60\70\61
+\60\62\64\60\64\64\70\62\66\70\63\61\65\65\64\60\60\60\60\60\60\60\60
+\60\60\64\61\65\65\64\60\60\60\3";
print "GOOD OCTAL\n$goodoct\n\n";

sub convert {
    $hexcommand=shift;
    $length = length($hexcommand);                            
    $tot = ($length/2)-1;                               
    print "length is: $length\n";
    print "tot is: $tot\n";
    for ($x=0; $x<=$tot; $x++){                             
        $chunk = substr($hexcommand, $offset, 2);                
        $dec = &hex2dec($chunk);
        $octbyte=sprintf "%lo", $dec;    
        $octcommand = $octcommand . "\\" . $octbyte;
        $offset+=2;                                  
    }
    return $octcommand;
}

sub hex2dec($) { return hex $_[0] }

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In reply to Returning variable from sub by cstrong

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