Both of the functions take, as their first argument, a string of characters which
describe the format of the data to be packed or unpacked. The pack function
takes a list of values to be packed as a second argument and returns a scalar character
string containing the packed values. The unpack function
takes a character string containing the values to be unpacked as a second argument, and
returns a list of individual values extracted from the string.
For a full list of the possible characters to use in the first argument to these functions,
you can consult the online documentation (through perldoc -f pack);
Table lists a few of the commonly used codes. One caution about
all but the ASCII and uuencoding formats is that these formats represent the native
binary format for the data type on the computer on which perl is running -- if you
create packed strings, they may not unpack properly on a different type of computer.
Using them to pack and unpack data on the same computer should not cause any problems.
When you're constructing a string of codes to use with these functions, you can
optionally follow any of the codes with an integer repeat count, or an asterisk
(*
) to indicate as many repeats as possible. Each combination of a code
and its optional count represents a chunk of data to either encode with pack
or decode with unpack. To illustrate, consider the problem of breaking up
the permissions from the ls command presented in Section .
We could extract the permissions and the filenames from each line of the ls -l
output with the following call to unpack (assuming $_ contains a line of
ls output):
($perms,$file) = unpack("a9\@54a*");Similarly, the three triplets of permissions could be placed in an array
@theperms
with the following call to unpack:
@theperms = unpack("a3" x 3,$perms);
The unpack function can be used, among other things, to decode uuencoded messages. Uuencoding is a technique which is sometimes used to encode binary files so that they can be safely emailed. (Binary files use all 8 bits of each byte of data, whereas ordinary text uses only 7 bits, so electronic mail is not suitable for sending binary files unless they are properly encoded.) The first line of a uuencoded file consists of the word begin followed by the octal code for the permission of the file and the file's name; this information should not be passed to the unpack function. Suppose we have a uuencoded binary file stored in the text file binary.uu, and we wish to extract the un-encoded form to the filename specified on the first line of the file. The following code would do the job:
open(FI,"<binary.uu") || die "Couldn't open binary.uu"; ($begin,$perm,$name) = split(" ",<FI>); #read the first line $rest = join("",<FI>); #read the rest of the file close(FI); open(FI,">$name") || die "Couldn't open $name" print FI unpack("u*",$rest); chmod(oct($perm),$name);By constructing an appropriate "begin" line, and using the pack function with the
u*
code, a similar approach could be used to create a
uuencoded file suitable for sending via electronic mail.