converting tiny binary strings for internet transmission

zentara has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I have a password that is encrypted with RC4, which results in a short binary string of non-prinable characters. I am looking for something like uuencode to change it to printable characters, so it can be stored as a cookie, retreived, and decoded. The problem is that the string is very short, and uuencode is probably overkill on it. What are good methods to do this conversion?

Comment on converting tiny binary strings for internet transmission

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Re: converting tiny binary strings for internet transmission by Anonymous Monk on Mar 29, 2002 at 07:54 UTC
`my $printable = unpack "H", $string;` Or to UUencode as you mentioned in your question: `my $printable = unpack "u", $string;`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: converting tiny binary strings for internet transmission by Juerd (Abbot) on Mar 28, 2002 at 21:17 UTC
Try any serializer. FreezeThaw, Storable. UUEncoding it is not such a bad idea	[reply]
Re: Answer: converting tiny binary strings for internet transmission by zentara (Archbishop) on Mar 28, 2002 at 23:41 UTC
Thanks for that pointer to serializers. I have done the following as a first attempt. Just send the hex. The one thing that gets me with this, is that when the last print occurs, it messes up my display, putting everything in binary. How do I prevent this? Anyone? `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; open(FH,"<adminpass"); binmode FH; my $binstring= <FH>; print "$binstring\n"; my $hexstr= unpack "H",$binstring; print "$hexstr\n"; my $binback= pack "H",$hexstr; print "$binback\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]


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