Perl Cookbook

Reading a String from a Binary File

Problem

You want to read a NUL-terminated string from a file, starting at a particular address.

Solution

Set $/ to an ASCII NUL, and read the string with <>:

$old_rs = $/;                       # save old $/
$/ = "\0";                          # NULL
seek(FH, $addr, SEEK_SET)           or die "Seek error: $!\n";
$string = <FH>;                     # read string
chomp $string;                      # remove NULL
$/ = $old_rs;                       # restore old $/

You can use local to save and restore $/ if you want:

{
    local $/ = "\0";
    # ...
}                           # $/ is automatically restored

Discussion

The example program shown in Example 8.5, bgets , accepts a filename and one or more byte addresses as arguments. Decimal, octal, or hexadecimal addresses may be specified. For each address, the program reads and prints the NULL- or EOF-terminated string at that position:

Example 8-5. bgets

#!/usr/bin/perl 
# bgets - get a string from an address in a binary file
use IO::Seekable;
($file, @addrs) = @ARGV             or die "usage: $0 file addr ...";
open(FH, $file)                     or die "cannot open $file: $!";
$/ = "\000";
foreach $addr (@addrs) {
    $addr = oct $addr if $addr =~ /^0/;
    seek(FH, $addr, SEEK_SET)
        or die "can't seek to $addr in $file: $!";
    printf qq{%#x %#o %d "%s"\n}, $addr, $addr, $addr, scalar <>;
}

Here’s a simple implementation of the Unix strings program:

Example 8-6. strings

#!/usr/bin/perl
# strings - pull strings out of a binary file
$/ = "\0";
while (<>) {
    while (/([\040-\176\s]{4,})/g) {
        print $1, "\n";
    }
}
                  
                  

See Also

The seek, getc, and ord functions in perlfunc(1) and in Chapter 3 of Programming ...