Converting hexadecimal numbers in strings to negative numbers, in Perl

Question

I have a bunch of numbers represented as hexadecimal strings in logfiles that are being parsed by a Perl script, and I'm relatively inexperienced with Perl. Some of these numbers are actually signed negative numbers, ie 0xFFFE == -1 when represented as a 16-bit signed integer. Can somebody please tell me the canonical way of getting the -1 representation of this number from the string FFFE in Perl, or otherwise point me to a tutorial or other resource ? I've already Googled around for this, and there doesn't seem to be much out there on dealing with negative numbers in Perl. I've also already done a cursory search of this site and much of the Perl topics seem to be meta-discussion about Perl.

Answer 1

You can use the hex() function to convert from hexadecimal to decimal, but it interprets the input as an unsigned value. To compensate for that pack the decimal value as an unsigned quantity and unpack it as a signed one:

my $num = unpack('s', pack('S', hex('FFFE')));

The 's' and 'S' templates are for signed and unsigned 16-bit quantities, respectively. See the documentation for the pack function for other templates and usage information.