finding length of encrypted(binary) string

[linuxfan]

Hi, My perl script reads an encrypted string from a server. It then calculates the length of this string and sends this number along with the string back to the server. I am using:

$str = read_str_from_server($args);
$len = length $str;
send_str_to_server($str,$len);

Based on the server response, I think that the above method fails for certain values of $str and $len. Is there an alternate function to count the nubmer of "bytes" in the encrypted string?

Thanks!

[bart]

You can enforce the string to be treated as pure bytes, by pushing it through an incantation of pack. Then, length will work.

my $bytes_string = pack 'C0a*', $string;
my $bytecount = length $bytes_string;

[BrowserUk]

Sounds like your binary data is being mistaken for unicode data. Using the bytes pragma, optionally localised around the call to length should fix the problem.

$s = "\x{200}\x{400}\x{301}";

print length $s;
3

print do{ use bytes; length $s };
6

[linuxfan]

Thanks for your reply. I realized I was not using the

use bytes pragma

in a different place in the program while extracting the encrypted text, and this was causing my program to fail. My program works like a charm now!

[Zed_Lopez]

Use the bytes pragma.