unpack knows how to deal efficiently with little/big-endian unsigned shorts without you having to do the byte-swapping yourself.

In recent perl's there are actually two mechanisms:

1. Little-endian: formats 'v' or 'S<'
2. Big-endian: formats 'n' or 'S>'

It's also worth noting that it is far more efficient to use a quantity specifier (number or * after the template character), than to step through the string picking out the individual words yourself.

This demonstrates both template options and both quantity specifiers options. (either could be used with either):

#! perl -slw
use strict;

my $raw = "\x45\xd2\xff\x76\x89\x3a\x00\x33";

my @leUShorts = unpack 'v4', $raw;
print "@leUShorts";

my @leUShorts2 = unpack 'S<*', $raw;
print "@leUShorts2";

my @beUShorts = unpack 'n4', $raw;
print "@beUShorts";

my @beUShorts2 = unpack 'S>*', $raw;
print "@beUShorts2";

__END__
C:\test>junk67
53829 30463 14985 13056
53829 30463 14985 13056
17874 65398 35130 51
17874 65398 35130 51
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