I would note that the ps2ascii application which is installed as part of the pstotext package does also include PDF to ASCII conversion (although the manual page does note that this application does not consider font encoding and cannot handle kerning particularly well) - If there is a requirement for a Perl implementation of this solution, the source package for this application may be enlightening.
perl -le "print unpack'N', pack'B32', '00000000000000000000001000000000'"
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