UNPACK
unpack TEMPLATE,EXPR

Unpack does the reverse of pack: it takes a string representing a structure and expands it out into a list value, returning the array value. (In a scalar context, it merely returns the first value produced.) The TEMPLATE has the same format as in the pack function. Here's a subroutine that does substring:

sub substr { local($what,$where,$howmuch) = @_; unpack("x$where a$howmuch", $what); }

and then there's

sub ordinal { unpack("c",$_[0]); } # same as ord()

In addition, you may prefix a field with a <number> to indicate that you want a<number>-bit checksum of the items instead of the items themselves. Default is a 16-bit checksum. For example, the following computes the same number as the System V sum program:

while (<>) { $checksum += unpack("%16C*", $_); } $checksum %= 65536;

The following efficiently counts the number of set bits in a bit vector:

$setbits = unpack("%32b*", $selectmask);

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