I'm talking more about situations where I'm manipulating binary data, and I don't want Perl even looking at the data and trying to guess what it is.

Instead of going through every single record in the file and unpacking the whole thing, it is often more efficient to use substr to get the few bytes i actually care about, and work with those. It would be similar to working with an actual character array in C.

Reading through bytes gives me the impression that Perl will try to figure out what kind of string I've got based on what's in it & where it came from unless I tell it otherwise.

In reply to Re^5: Alternative to bytes::length() by assemble
in thread Alternative to bytes::length() by creamygoodness

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