Hi! I'm a bit puzzled. I'm runnning a file through openssl to decode it. A portion of the output, in which I'm interested, is said to be "in Unicode, padded with 00".

So when I look at it in a hexdump, it reads like this: 

00 4d 00 61  00 67 00 6e - 00 65 00 74  00 00 00 00 [.M.a.g.n.e.t....]

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There are several strings of bytes which I read from openssl's output. I unpack them into an array. Demo code could be something like this: 

$buf="\x00M\x00a\x00g\x00n\x00e\x00t\x00\x00\x00\x00" x 4;
my(@unpacked)= unpack "a16" x 4, $buf;

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So now I wonder how to convert the bytestrings in @unpacked to proper perl strings which I can print out without the \x00. Additionally I'd like to remove the padded zeroes.

I tried to use decode_utf8 and decode("utf16", ...) on them, but the first one did not seem to have any impact and the latter one fails with (example) "UTF-16:Unrecognised BOM 4d"

Does anyone of you have a hint what I'm doing wrong?

s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
+.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e

In reply to Unicode Puzzle by Skeeve

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