If you're looking to find the Perl equivalent of that data structure, another poster already nailed it for you: use a hash. If you're looking to pull in binary data created from that C structure into your Perl program, you probably want unpack. Something like this might do what you're looking for:

$_ = ...;   # binary data in $_
my ($id, $secs, $version, $misc, $data) =
   unpack("a2iia10a9999", $_);
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If you need to generate binary data with information you have, simply change unpack to pack and reverse your arguments around. Pass $id/$secs/etc and get back a binary representation. The format string remains the same.

When you say you want a 10,000 byte array, what are you talking about? Are you talking about a C array? I don't know how you expect to judge how many bytes a Perl array will consume. If you want 10,000 elements, that's already been given to you. 10,000 bytes in a string could be done by: "\0" x 10_000 Perhaps you could elaborate and/or use some more appropriate terminology so we can figure out what you mean? Heh.

Hope this helps.

my $item = { 
    char => 'df',
    secs => 65,
    version => 4,
    misc => 'data',
    data => 'misc'
    };

# access with
$item->{char} = 'ef';
# the print you asked for, outputs 0x0041
printf ("0x%04x", $item->{secs});

# what do you mean binary 0's? something like this?
my @array = ("\000") x 10000;
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You are making a common c-programmer mistake, one that I regularly made when I started programming in perl. From what I see of your note you equate scalars with strings. This is not the case. Consider the following:

my $a;
$a = "Mary had a little lamb"; # $a contains a string
$a = 2001;                     # $a now contains a number
$a = '2001';                   # $a STILL contains a number
$a .= 'AD';                    # $a is a string once more :)
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How this prints is another matter. print, printf etc all output strings. This is their nature, they know naught else ;). The simplest way to output the byte value of a number is to use the following:

This will work the same way whiether you represent your data as a number or as a strng of numeric characters; perl interprets both as a number.

print pack("i", 3000);
¨Y¡á
print pack("i", '3000');
¨Y¡á
print pack("i", "3000");
¨Y¡á
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Perhaps something like the simple object below will help you

my $data = Data->new("aa", 65, 1.2, "misc", "data string");
print $data->print_secs();

package Data;

sub new {
    my ($class, $id, $secs, $vers, $misc, $data) = @_;

    my $self = {
        'id' => $id,
        'secs' => $secs,
        'version' => $vers,
        'misc' => $misc,
        'data' => $data,
    };

    bless $self, $class;

    return $self;
}

sub print_secs { # Returns $self->{'secs'} as a byte stream
    $self = shift;

    return pack('i', $self->{'secs'});
}
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This is a bit crude but perhaps it will give you some ideas.

I don't tend to use it, but I figure mentioning Class::Struct might be interesting to you guys:

use Class::Struct;

struct data => {
   id      => '$',
   secs    => '$',
   version => '$',
   misc    => '$',
   data    => '$',
   next    => 'data',    # just an example
};

$one = new data (id => 1, secs => 2);
$two = new data (id => 2, secs => 2, data => 'hi');
$one->next($two);

print $one->next->data;    # "hi"
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