June 2002
Beginner
759 pages
80h 42m
English
The use bytes pragma
disables character semantics for the rest of the lexical scope in
which it appears. no bytes can
reverse the effect of use bytes
within the current lexical scope. Perl normally assumes character
semantics in the presence of character data (i.e., data from a source
marked as being of a particular character encoding). When use bytes is in effect, the encoding is
temporarily ignored, and each string is treated as a series of
bytes.
bytes is used as
follows:
$x = chr(400);
print "Length is ", length $x, "\n"; # "Length is 1"
printf "Contents are %vd\n", $x; # "Contents are 400"
{
use bytes;
print "Length is ", length $x, "\n"; # "Length is 2"
printf "Contents are %vd\n", $x; # "Contents are 198.144"
}