Binary data type?

KPeter0314 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

As I am just a lowly monk, I come to the greater wisdom of the group.

I have a set of values that I would like to possibly store in a binary-style array. The data looks something like this:

Slot   0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7
Value  A  A  B  B  C  C  B  B
[download]

Is there a way to store the values binary-style? That way the values for A, B, and C would be 11000000, 00110011, and 00001100 respectfully.

I would also need a method to mask the info back out of the binary storage to get my results back. e.g. (in bad pseudo-code)

if ( mask 01000000 matches arrayA )
then A is slot 1

Or, am I trying too hard?

-Kurt

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