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"toylet" <toylet_at_mail.hongkong.com> wrote in message
news:...
> Tad McClellan wrote:
> >>> printf ".%02x.\n", ord foreach (split //, $line);
> >> can I also use split(/\b/,$line)?
> > What happened when you tried it?
>
> it worked as well. SO it's the default separator used by split()?

read the docs before asking things like this
perldoc -f split

it is not so much a default separator, as a special case
of the function split with no arguments, that has an
extra funtionality.

gnari

"toylet" <toylet_at_mail.hongkong.com> wrote in message
news:403d79e7$...
> > Maybe that a text in Chinese with 20 characters typically requires 40
bytes
> > to be stored?
> > So what to you want to know? The length of the string in characters or
the
> > size of the allocated memory. You were asking for the memory size.
>
> I didn't expect my question on displaying the bytes in a string would
> end up talking about multi-lingual isssues.

it was just that someone corrected you whan you implied that length()
would give the number of bytes, which is only valid for some
encodings/systems. the thread only went on because you protested.

gnari

"toylet" <toylet_at_mail.hongkong.com> wrote in message
news:...
> >> my $line = <>;
> >>
> >> I input "a" and press enter.
> >>
> >> Now $line should contain 2 bytes: 'a' and end-of-line character.
> >>
> >> How could I print the content of $line (both bytes) in hex format?
> > perldoc -f substr
> > perldoc -f hex
>
> hex() should not be relevant as I need to convert from numeric to hex
> digits. Already knew about substr().
>

Then why use a none numeric example, 'a'?

toylet wrote:

> You meant length() would react to unicode settings in Perl?

Yes. UTF-8 encoding uses 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits per character.

>> It is important to stop thinking of characters as matching C's char
>> type, and to stop thinking of C's char type always being 8 bits (even
>> though a char is always a byte).
>
> I think one byte always equal to 8 bits. All computer courses taught
> that. 9-bit byte? What machines do that?

Three of the first five computers connected to the ARPANET were
36-bit computers. They used 7-bit ASCII for regular text,
SIXBIT for COBOL data, strings of 5-bit codes for FORTRAN error
messages. When talking to other computers, the PDP-10 used
8-bit bytes, 9-bit bytes, 12-bit bytes, 16-bit bytes and 18-bit bytes.

A byte is defined to be a contiguous set of bits. When talking
about 8-bit bytes, the proper term is "octet".

-Joe http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/