Bit operations in Perl

Question

I have an attribute (32 bits-long), that each bit responsible to specific functionality. Perl script I'm writing should turn on 4th bit, but save previous definitions of other bits.

I use in my program:

Sub BitOperationOnAttr

{

my $a="";

MyGetFunc( $a);

$a |= 0x00000008;

MySetFunc( $a);

}

** MyGetFunc/ MySetFunc my own functions that know read/fix value.

Questions:

1. if usage of $a |= 0x00000008; is right ?

2. how extract hex value by Regular Expression from string I have : For example:

"Attribute: Somestring: value (8 long (0x8))"

Answer 1

Perl provides several ways for dealing with binary data:

• The bitwise operators &, |, and ~.
• The pack and unpack functions.
• The vec function.

Your scenario sounds like a set of packed flags. The bitwise operators are a good fit for this:

my $mask = 1 << 3;   # 0x0008
$value |=  $mask;    # set bit
$value &= ~$mask;    # clear bit
if ($value & $mask)  # check bit

vec is designed for use with bit vectors. (Each element has the same size, which must be a power of two.) It could work here as well:

vec($value, 3, 1) = 1;  # set bit
vec($value, 3, 1) = 0;  # clear bit
if (vec($value, 3, 1))  # check bit

pack and unpack are better suited for working with things like C structs or endianness.

Answer 2

1. if usage of $a |= 0x00000008; is right ?

Yes, this is fine.

1. how extract hex value by Regular Expression from string I have : For example:

"Attribute: Somestring: value (8 long (0x8))"

I'm assuming you have a string like the above, and want to use a regular expression to extract the "0x8". In that case, something like:

if ($string =~ m/0x([0-9a-fA-F]+)/) {
    $value = hex($1);
} else {
    # string didn't match
}

should work.