Pack() function Equivalent in PB6?

[RyanCross]

Ok in Perl there is a function called "pack".

pack(TEMPLATE, LIST);

I'm wondering if there is a simlar function in PB or a way of doing somethign similar. For people not familar with Perl or this funciton in Perl he's the dicription of it:

Takes an array or list of values and packs it into a binary structure, returning the string containing the structure. The TEMPLATE is a sequence of characters that gives the order and type of values.

Here's the line of code I'm trying to convert to PB6:

$buffer = pack("Nnna*", 1, 1, length($nickname), $nickname);

Tahnks for any help!

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Thank you,
Ryan M. Cross
Webmaster FlexiFish Inc. UK
Likuid Creations Inc.

[This message has been edited by RyanCross (edited February 27, 2001).]

[Lance Edmonds]

What does the resultant "packed byte list" look like? In other words, can you show us some "before" and "after" results?

Thanks!


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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[RyanCross]

No problem, but I don't know if this will help much. Here's the code a put in my Perl script:

$buffer = pack("Nnna*", 1, 1, length("RyanCross"), "RyanCross");
print $buffer;

This outputs: (without quotes)

"      RyanCross"

-or more readable format: (numbers represent Ascii numbers of characters that cannot be seen)

"(0)(0)(0)(1)(0)(1)(0)(9)RyanCross"

Hopefully that helped and didn't hender. Hehe.


------------------
Thank you,
Ryan M. Cross
Webmaster FlexiFish Inc. UK
Likuid Creations Inc.




[This message has been edited by RyanCross (edited February 27, 2001).]

[John Krahn]

FYI Lance, The documentation for the pack (and unpack) function can be found at: http://www.perl.com/pub/doc/manual/h...func/pack.html

John


[This message has been edited by John Krahn (edited February 28, 2001).]

[Bern Ertl]

Sounds like the Pack function is really making a dynamic TYPE
structure.

I'm not sure how easy or practical it would be to attempt writing
a function in PB that can accept variable numbers of parameters that
can be of any type.

But if you have a specific list (or list specification), you should
be able to write a custom function. Ie:

FUNCTION PackNnna( BYVAL One AS LONG, _
                         BYVAL Two AS INTEGER, _
                         BYVAL Three AS INTEGER, _
                         BYVAL Four AS STRING) AS STRING

   FUNCTION = MKL$( One) + MKI$( Two) + MKI$( Three) + Four

END FUNCTION

I'm not sure if the MKL$ & MKI$ use big endian or not, but you
get the idea.



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Bernard Ertl

[Lance Edmonds]

WHat sort of practical use would such a function offer?

------------------
Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>