Reputation: 17
I confused with pack
and unpack
while writing a Perl script. What is the difference between between pack
and unpack
in Perl (explain with a simple example)?
Upvotes: -4
Views: 1307
Reputation: 69314
Do you understand the difference between split
and join
? unpack
is a bit like split
(it takes a string and produces a list of values) and pack
is a bit like join
(it takes a list of values and produces a string).
Upvotes: 5
Reputation: 13942
pack
takes a list of values and converts it into a string using the rules given by the template.
unpack
takes a string and expands it out to a list of values using the rules given by the template.
$ perl -E 'say for unpack "H2H2", "56"'
35
36
$ perl -E 'say pack "H2H2", 35, 36'
56
Upvotes: 3