I'm planning a new release in a couple of weeks when I get a few weeks off work. I guess one way of encoding rather than decoding packets would be to use a pack() instead of an unpack() with the same args.

Take a look at libnet. I was thinking about a perl wrapper for this but the C source gets so hairy it doesn't compile with any of the Perl XS header files. Well it didn't in 1999 anyway.)-:

http://www.canvasnet.com/libnet/

Tim.