How to unpack strings?

[ft_ml]

Hello all,

I´m trying to unpack variable length strings.

In an application I receive a stream of bytes which contains a number n (2 bytes) and n strings of variable length. All strings ends whith a null.

I wrote the next piece of code:

sub GetStrings() {
my ($data) = @_;

($num_of_strings) = unpack "n", $data;

my $fmt = "n";
$fmt .= "a*x" x $num_of_strings;

my @data_array= unpack $fmt, $data;
}

However it does not work!.

I have been doing some trials and It seems that unpack sees the n strings as a unique string and it needs the exact length of it. For instance

@data_array = unpack "na${length}x" $data

do the job if $length has the sum of lengths of the strings.

Can someone give some advice or explain the rigth way to do it?


Thanks a lot.

Carlos