A An ascii string, will be space padded.
a An ascii string, will be null padded.
b A bit string (ascending bit order, like vec()).
B A bit string (descending bit order).
h A hex string (low nybble first).
H A hex string (high nybble first).
c A signed char value.
C An unsigned char value.
s A signed short value.
S An unsigned short value.
i A signed integer value.
I An unsigned integer value.
l A signed long value.
L An unsigned long value.
n A short in "network" order.
N A long in "network" order.
v A short in "VAX" (little-endian) order.
V A long in "VAX" (little-endian) order.
f A single-precision float in the native format.
d A double-precision float in the native format.
p A pointer to a null-terminated string.
P A pointer to a structure (fixed-length string).
u A uuencoded string.
w A BER compressed integer. Bytes give an unsigned integer base
128, most significant digit first, with as few digits as
possible, and with the bit 8 of each byte except the last set
to "1."
x A null byte.
X Back up a byte.
@ Null fill to absolute position.
Each letter may optionally be followed by a number which gives a repeat count. With all types except ``a'',
``A'', ``b'',
``B'', ``h'',
``H'', and
``P'' the pack function will gobble up that many values from the
LIST.
A * for the repeat count means to use however many items are left. The ``a'' and
``A'' types gobble just one value, but pack it as a string of length count, padding with nulls or spaces as necessary. (When unpacking,
``A'' strips trailing spaces and nulls, but ``a'' does not.) Likewise, the ``b'' and
``B'' fields pack a string that many bits long. The ``h'' and
``H'' fields pack a string that many nybbles long. The
``P'' packs a pointer to a structure of the size indicated by the length. Real numbers (floats and doubles) are in the native machine format only; due to the multiplicity of floating formats around, and the lack of a standard ``network'' representation, no facility for interchange has been made. This means that packed floating point data written on one machine may not be readable on another - even if both use
IEEE floating point arithmetic (as the endian-ness of the memory representation is not part of the
IEEE spec). Note that Perl uses doubles internally for all numeric calculation, and converting from double into float and thence back to double again will lose precision (i.e.,
unpack("f", pack) will not in general equal $foo).
Examples:
$foo = pack("cccc",65,66,67,68);
# foo eq "ABCD"
$foo = pack("c4",65,66,67,68);
# same thing
$foo = pack("ccxxcc",65,66,67,68);
# foo eq "AB\0\0CD"
$foo = pack("s2",1,2);
# "\1\0\2\0" on little-endian
# "\0\1\0\2" on big-endian
$foo = pack("a4","abcd","x","y","z");
# "abcd"
$foo = pack("aaaa","abcd","x","y","z");
# "axyz"
$foo = pack("a14","abcdefg");
# "abcdefg\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"
$foo = pack("i9pl", gmtime);
# a real struct tm (on my system anyway)
sub bintodec {
unpack("N", pack("B32", substr("0" x 32 . shift, -32)));
}
The same template may generally also be used in the unpack function.