Using regular expression substitution on binary data

jeremyh has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

The quote below from www.perl.com makes me think this is okay.

"Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data..."

I am filtering the output of an app that generates text followed by PDF by using a regular expression substition that gets rid of the text. (The "app" is actually several components piped together - it is convenient to just let the text output stay as long as I can remove it at the end). This seems to work, but wondered if there might problems that I just haven't run into yet. <update> I should give a little more detail:

I am capturing all the output in a scalar and then doing several multi-line RE substitutions on it using the "s" flag.

Comment on Using regular expression substitution on binary data

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Re: Using regular expression substitution on binary data by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Mar 03, 2006 at 18:23 UTC
Your question is too vague to give a sensical answer. But if you all you’re wondering about is whether using regular expressions on binary data may cause problems, then no, it won’t. You might want to say `use bytes` and use the associated functions, possibly, but there’s nothing inherently problematic about it. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]