Hello wise brethren, I'm seeking your help again. What I need to do is to parse fixed-width records in arrays and send the resulting data over network. Bandwidth matters a lot in this case, so I'd like to "compress" the data by converting numbers from string representation given by unpack() to numerical values. I'm trying to find the most effective way to do this in Perl, this is what I managed so far: 
my @types = qw(number number string number boolean...)
my @data = unpack($template, $line);
my @newdata; my $i = 0;
while (my $item = shift @data) {
  if ($types[$i] ne 'string') {
    $item = $item ? $item + 0 : 0;
  }
  push @newdata, $item;
}

[download]

This is weird but shifting items one by one into new array seems to be a lot faster than iterating over the array with canonical for (@list). I wonder if there is any more deep Perl magic that would allow making processing even faster?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Alex.

In reply to Unpacking and converting by dwalin

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