It is doing bitwise operators, just on the bits in your characters. This is probably not what you want. Look into using pack and unpack:

my $p1 = pack( 'H*', "24" ); # hex 24
my $p2 = pack( 'H*', "04" ); # hex 4
my $p3 = $p1 & $p2;
print unpack( 'H*', $p3 ), "\n";  # prints 04

$p1 = pack( 'H*', "2f" );
$p2 = pack( 'H*', "14" );
$p3 = $p1 | $p2;
print unpack( 'H*', $p3 ), "\n"; # prints 3f
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