I have a question or two on packing/unpacking/splitting/joining. I read a lot of messages on here already on packing and unpacking on how everyone else is having problems understanding it as well. Does anyone have a good analogy or scenario on why it's used and how it works?

I just wrote a script which encodes/decodes messages. It encoded perfectly while unpacking("C*".. Using the same method I tried to pack("C".. to decode it but it ran into a problem. It would only decode the first character, the others were deleted somehow. A perl monk told me I had to use split on packing and join on unpacking. This solved the problem, now the entire message can be encoded.

The user tried to explain why this had to be done but I didn't understand it in the least, can someone else try to help explain it? The only piece I got was the reason it didn't work was because my messages had spaces.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

"Age is nothing more than an inaccurate number bestowed upon us at birth as just another means for others to judge and classify us"

sulfericacid

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