This does seem like a glaring omission in unpack
, doesn't it? As a consolation prize, you could use an a*
to the end of the unpack template to return the unused portion of the input string.
# The variable-length "w" format is to make the example slightly more interesting.
$x = pack "w*", 126..129;
while(length $x) {
# unpack one number, keep the rest packed in $x
($n, $x) = unpack "wa*", $x;
print $n;
}
If your packed string is really long, this is not a good idea since it has to make a copy of the "remainder" portion of the string every time you do an unpack.