Update: looks like read() can take into account UTF-8 characters if that is what you have. Otherwise if just plain ASCII, then its one byte per character.

Dunno how you can fail to do this with a C prog -- this is one of the rare instances where it would probably be simpler.

Anyway, if you want to work with individual characters in perl here's some clues:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open (IN, "<$0") || die;    # $0 is this script
my $data;
read(IN,$data,30);    # read in first 30 characters
close(IN);

# now split those into an array of individual values
my @chars = unpack('c*',$data);
print chr($_)."\n" foreach (@chars);
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Guys thanks a lot for your quick answer and you were rigth about the C program it was easier and simpler

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
    int c, i = 1;
    
    while (i <= 100){
     c = getchar();
     putchar(c);
     i++;
     }
}
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The same in Perl:

print getc() for 1..100;
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