Dear Monks,

I have been re-directed from http://perlguru.com with regards to the following question. I have been attempting to write a code that reads a simple ASCII file and outputs it in a binary format. The problem comes that the outputted file is not in binary format (it is still in ASCII format, and this is backed up doing od -c filename).

I have tried using binmode <filehandle>, ":raw"; and also open (<fh>, ">:raw", $filename); but to no avail. Any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong? I enclose the rather primitive code at the bottom of this message.

Help regarding this matter would be very much appreciated. I have tried it on two separate versions of Linux, one based at home which is FC7 and the other is a version of CentOS. My hone version does have PerlIO.pm installed which makes it all the more perplexing. If you would like a copy of the input file, please let me know and I'll make it available.

Regards

Steve

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
use strict; 
use vars qw/ $i $filename @line @splitdata @data $out /; 
$i=1649; 
#Obtain name of file 
printf ("Please enter the name of file which you would like converted\
+n"); 
chomp ($filename=<STDIN>); 
printf "Filename inputted was %s\n", $filename; 
#Open data file, rid the new lines and store it to the line array 
open ( DATAFILE, "<", "$filename"); 
chomp (@line = <DATAFILE>); 
close DATAFILE; 
#Read specific lines in while loop, split each part of each line, remo
+ve whitespace via pop at the start and the end of the line and store 
+it to a new array called data 
while (defined($line[$i]) && $i < 3288){ 
    @splitdata = split (/\s+/,$line[$i]); 
    pop @splitdata; 
    @splitdata =reverse(@splitdata); 
    pop @splitdata; 
    @splitdata =reverse(@splitdata); 
    push @data, @splitdata; 
    $i = $i + 1; 
} 
#Open an outfile and write the contents of data, in hexadecimal, into 
+a binary format 
open (OUTFILE, ">","newfile"); 
binmode OUTFILE, ":raw"; 
foreach $out (@data){ 
    printf OUTFILE ("%08x\n", $out); 
} 
close OUTFILE;
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