Hi monks, I'm looking for a fast way to convert a string of hex values to their ascii char value.

For years I've been using a hash map to store the hex correspondents, and a regex to replace them, but performance is a little crappy for large, say 1MB+, strings. This is what I have now: 

# the conversion table 

my %table = ( '41' => 'A', '42' => 'B' ...);

#   (actually I create it with a one liner, 
#       but I'll spell it out here for simplicity)

my $input = '4142A0B1';  # usually very large
$input =~ s/(..)/$table{$1}/g;  # convert it
print OUTFILE $input;  # print converted to file
Any ideas on how to improve this? Using pack or unpack, for instance? The problem is that I can't come up with a good string-to-string unpack sequence.
I appreciate any pointers on optimizing this.

Barry

In reply to convert hex to char fast by Anonymous Monk

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