What you want is the chr function, though you'll need to give it an offset so that 1=a, etc.

my @message=(8,5,12,12,15);
print map(chr(96+$_),@message); # Change the 96 to 64 for uppercase
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perl -e "print chr( 2**6 + $_ ) foreach qw/ 15 54 41 36 /"
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Cheers,
Ovid

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$first = ord("a");
for (my $x=0; $x < 10; $x++)
{
   print chr($first+$x). " ";
}
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No, since Perl is not a strongly typed language! :)

Hey, watch that. Larry has said that Perl can either be considered a very weakly typed language or an extremely strongly typed language with only a few datatypes: scalars, arrays, hashes, and filehandles. I tend to lean towards the latter, but both are accurate, but it's not accurate to say only the first.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Oh, what the heck, just for fun:

my %int_to_char;
@int_to_char{ 1 .. 26} = (a..z);

# get @array

my @chars = map { $int_to_char{$_} } @array;
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If only because it promises to handle differences in locale nicely ... (mondo inefficient, too =)

You need to take a look at the ord, pack, and chr functions. (Look at the first example for 'pack').

map may also fit into your solution someplace. Hint hint. :)

You don't need to typecast it. Perl is a loosely-typed language. There is no syntax to typecast things in Perl.

stephen

The following program does indeed print out 'ABCD':

use strict;
my $foo = pack("cccc",65,66,67,68);
print $foo;
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What I do not understand is why it works. Page 757 of Camel3 says that pack "takes a LIST of ordinary Perl values and converts them into a string of bytes."

Now who says that "A" is a byte? Maybe my operating system uses Unicode and "A" is two bytes. Isn't ASCII a 7-bit encoding scheme? (A byte is eight bits, not 7.)

So why do the bytes that pack returns necessarily print out as 'ABCD' and not as gibberish?

Yes, who said that 'A' is a byte? 'A' is merely the ASCII representation of the byte 0x41. If you were using a different character set, then print pack("cccc",65,66,67,68) could very well produce different output.

Then there is always the simple array method:

my @var = ('','a'..'z');

print "$var[$_] " for (1,2,3,10);
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Simple, but somewhat effective. Just don't forget to pad the array so the integers line up; otherwise you'll have to use $var[$_ - 1].