CODEWITHSUNDEEP
perlunix
Gautam
Gautam

Reputation: 375

Using hexadecimal values in a Perl variable

I have a variable, $count, which will take a decimal value from the command line, and I have a piece of code which generates files with name filename001 filename002 ....filename00a,filename00b etc. It appends a hexadecimal number(without 0x) to filename for every new file it generates.

I use the variable $count to keep track of the number that is appended to filename. I want to pull out lines containing a particular text Result: from the generated file (filename00b filename00a, etc.). For this purpose I use the grep tool in the following way:

`grep "Result:" path to the file/filename0*$count`

This works fine till I reach the 10th file when 10 becomes a in hexadecimal, but $count in the grep command is simplified to 10, so grep is not able to find the file. I tried using hex($count), but it does not seem to work. It required that $count variable can be incremented or decremented, and it still holds the hex value. Is there a way to do this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 18174

Answers (1)

janos
janos

Reputation: 124648

The hex function in perl interprets its argument as a hex string and returns the corresponding integer value, for example:

print hex '0xAf'; # prints '175'
print hex 'aF';   # same

This from the definition of hex in perldoc -f hex.

It seem you want to do the opposite, convert your decimal number to a hex representation. You can do that with printf for example:

printf("%03x", 175); # prints '0af'
printf("%03x", 0xAf); # same

If you want to save the value in a variable, use sprintf instead of printf, it returns the string instead of printing it.

Upvotes: 8

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