in reply to Need to read certain number of chars in a file

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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Re^2: Need to read certain number of chars in a file
by ranrodrig (Novice) on Oct 18, 2010 at 20:35 UTC

    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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[d/l]

      The same in Perl: 

      print getc() for 1..100;

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[d/l]

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