jroberts has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, i'm parsing some files that have embedded binary data at various random locations. is there a function or module that implements something like the old libc function isachar()? I'd like to be able to detect these binary characters. Thanks in advance.

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Re: isachar() equivalent?
by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Jul 03, 2001 at 07:21 UTC

    You can define a character class for the range you want to detect:

    my $bins=qr/[\x80-\xff]/; # or whatever
m/$bins/ && my_action();

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    After Compline,
    Zaxo

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Re: isachar() equivalent?
by tadman (Prior) on Jul 03, 2001 at 08:32 UTC
    I'm not sure exactly what you mean by isachar, since that doesn't appear to be one of the ANSI C standard functions. However, taking Zaxo's code one step further: 
    sub isachar
{
    return pop =~ /^[\x00-\x7F]/;
}

# Or alternatively
sub isalnum
{
    return pop =~ /^\w/;
}

# As in:
$is = isachar('a');

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    Update:
    crazyinsomiac pointed out "pop is not a variable", but it is a quick way of retrieving the first element of @_, a.k.a. $_[0].
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Re: isachar() equivalent?
by clintp (Curate) on Jul 03, 2001 at 17:58 UTC
    You might also want to consider using one of the POSIX character classes. They're a little more flexible than the \w or \d support normally found in regexps.

    perldoc perlre and search for POSIX for more info.

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