Re: Handling bits in Perl

The same bit operations available to C (&, |, ^, << and >>) are available to Perl. Perl also has vec. If you plan on doing some serious number crunching, you could use PDL or interface to C code via XS or Inline::C.

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Re^2: Handling bits in Perl by Thelonius (Priest) on Jul 25, 2006 at 15:30 UTC
If ikegami's excellent suggestions aren't enough, there's also a Bit::Vector module on CPAN. One nice thing about the bitwise operators in Perl is that you can use them on whole strings, not just on integers. For example, `use strict; my $x = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"; my $y = ("A" ^ "a") x length($x); my $z = $x & ~$y; print "\$z = $z\n";` [download] This outputs `$z = ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ`. (This is just an example, not recommended for case conversion because it screws up non-alphabetic characters.) You should also be aware of pack/unpack "H", pack/unpack "B", or "b*, to print bit strings for debugging, to input long constants, etc.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Handling bits in Perl by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 25, 2006 at 15:35 UTC
Unforunately, you can't use `<<` and `>>` on strings :(	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Handling bits in Perl by Thelonius (Priest) on Jul 26, 2006 at 12:33 UTC
Good point! That would be cool, though.	[reply]