Perl scalars cannot be stored or communicated; they are confined to a Perl interpreter instance. The values they contain must be serialised, which is to say converted to a stream of bytes, in order to do so. This is pack's primary purpose. unpack is used to do the inverse, namely deserialising, which is to say converting sequences of bytes into scalars.

In reply to Re: What are pack/unpack used for? by ikegami
in thread What are pack/unpack used for? by Anonymous Monk

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