! Aware to Perl: How do I handle binary data correctly?

How do I handle binary data correctly?

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Perl is binary clean, so this shouldn't be a problem. For example, this works fine (assuming the files are found):

    if (`cat /vmunix` =~ /gzip/) {
        print "Your kernel is GNU-zip enabled!\n";
    }

On some systems, however, you have to play tedious games with ``text'' versus ``binary'' files. See binmode.

If you're concerned about 8-bit ASCII data, then see the perllocale manpage.

If you want to deal with multibyte characters, however, there are some gotchas. See the section on Regular Expressions.

Source: Perl FAQ: Data Manipulation
Copyright: Copyright (c) 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.

(Corrections, notes, and links courtesy of RocketAware.com)

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