I don't have a production grade binary yet

Since you are dealing with binary data I don't think your "eyecatcher" is a good idea as "\x3d\x3d" ("==") could legitimately be part of your data. I think it better to rely on a record starting with a byte count immediately followed by a fixed length header string that can easily be identified and validated, perhapd by regular expression, e.g. /^Record\s\d{5}$/ for "Record 00001", "Record 02784" etc. The chance of such a string appearing in the binary data is very much less likely and should make unravelling bad records far easier.

I don't know if you have any control over the format of the binary files but I feel that the "==" between records is just storing up trouble and should be reconsidered. It is too short to be unlikely to appear in the data and, by preceding the record, adds complications to record alignment.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re^3: Reading binary file in perl having records of different length by johngg
in thread Reading binary file in perl having records of different length by jaypal

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