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Hi,
All help is appreciated.
I have to read a binary file having a given structure (not important here).
One field that i need to read is a 4 byte field specifying some page
numeber.

If i want to display this page number, how can u do this?
The below fragment does not seem to work,

--SNIP--
read(IN, $buffer, 4); #IN is the fh for a file open in binary mode..
$page_number = ord($buffer);
print "[XXX] $page_number\n";
--SNIP--

For example, if $buffer contains the following four values,
0x74 0x29 0x00 0x00
then
print will print
[XXX] 116
which is dec(0x74)while I want dec(0x74|0x29|0x00|0x00);
(do not worry about the endianess at this point.)

Thanks
Shank

Shashank Khanvilkar wrote:
> All help is appreciated.
> I have to read a binary file having a given structure (not important here).
> One field that i need to read is a 4 byte field specifying some page
> numeber.
>
> If i want to display this page number, how can u do this?
> The below fragment does not seem to work,

Just guessing here, but I bet you want to look into pack and/or unpack
perldoc -f pack
perldoc -f unpack
perldoc perlpacktut

> --SNIP--
> read(IN, $buffer, 4); #IN is the fh for a file open in binary mode..
> $page_number = ord($buffer);
> print "[XXX] $page_number\n";
> --SNIP--
>
> For example, if $buffer contains the following four values,
> 0x74 0x29 0x00 0x00
> then
> print will print
> [XXX] 116
> which is dec(0x74)

.... which is exactly what
perldoc -f ord
says would happen.

Paul Lalli

Shashank Khanvilkar <> writes:

> The below fragment does not seem to work,
>
> --SNIP--
> read(IN, $buffer, 4); #IN is the fh for a file open in binary mode..
> $page_number = ord($buffer);

You need to get acquainted with pack() and unpack(). See:
perldoc -f pack
perldoc -f unpack
perldoc perlpacktut

In this case you'd use unpack(), like so:
my $page_number = unpack('L', $buffer);

sherm--

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