in reply to How to open a file in hexadecimal form?

If the file actually contains text that consists entirely of hexadecimal digit characters -- e.g. a file is ten bytes long (plus LF or CRLF line-termination, perhaps), and contains just characters like this:
B58013A7FF
then one plan would be to group the string of hex digits into pairs then replace the ones that are "A7" with "00" and rebuild the string -- something like this would do it:
while (<DATA>) { chomp; my $out = ''; while ( /([0-9a-f]{2})/gi ) { $out .= ( uc($1) eq 'A7' ) ? "00" : $1; } print "$out\n"; } __DATA__ b58013A7FF
On the other hand, if you want to treat the file as binary data, and any single byte in the file that happens to have the value 0xA7 (i.e. 167. decimal, 10100111 binary) should be replaced by a null byte, then the plan would be read some number of raw bytes into a scalar, replace 0xA7 with 0x00 throughout, and write the result -- something like this (set up as a stdin > stdout filter):
binmode STDIN; binmode STDOUT; $/ = \8192; # set "input record separator" to 8KB per read while (<>) { tr/\xa7/\x00/; print; }
In case you don't know about stdin > stdout filters, it's just a matter of running the script using redirection from some file for input and redirection to some other file for output, like this:
script.pl < input.file > output.file

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Re^2: How to open a file in hexadecimal form?
by Anonymous Monk on May 12, 2005 at 05:31 UTC
    It's a binary file that I need to edit. The following code works perfectly:

    binmode STDIN;
    binmode STDOUT;
    $/ = \8192; # set "input record separator" to 8KB per read

    while (<>) {
    tr/\xa7/\x00/;
    print;
    }


    Is it possible to look for more than one hexadecimal number back to back. For example, if I wanted to search the variable for all instances of x31 x33 x39 x37 (not appearing individually but appearing as 1397) how could I replace a set of four hexadecimal numbers with x00 x00 x00 x00 ? And I'm sure this is probably a stupid question, but why does the input record separator need to be set at 8kb? Thanks.
      <code></code> tags are the preferred way to post formatted plain text here.

      The input record separator needs to be set to something, and 8kb is a reasonable value. It shouldn't be "\n" because you might not have any. But you can use it for your new problem:

      $/ = '1397'; # You don't have to specify the hex numbers; it's all th +e same to Perl while (<>) { # 1397 appears at the end of the record, if at all # so an anchored search-and-replace handles it s/1397$/\0\0\0\0/; }

      Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.
        That's some pretty wicked Perl foo :-)

        -Scott