The problem here is that, in the general case (which the OP may not care about, I'll admit) using plain ol' pack/unpack isn't very portable, as you have to tell it how the structure is laid out in memory. And C makes very few guarantees about that. Merely by looking at the data you can't tell, for example, whether you have a 16-, 32- or 64-bit value; you can't tell whether a word is signed or unsigned; you can't tell whether a structure has been padded with empty space so that its members are on word boundaries; and so on.

I'd take a look at Convert::Binary::C, and in particular the ccconfig script that comes with it.

In reply to Re^2: C types and SV's by DrHyde
in thread C types and SV's and unpack by blakew

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