How can I print characters with their octal representations? Note that these characters might be special characters (escapes, backscapes, arrow keys, etc.).
For example, I would like a function 'printoctal', such that:
my $char = 'P';
printoctal $char;
And I would like that to print 120.
You want two things: ord takes a string, and returns the numeric value of that string's first character. That is, ord "P" is 80.
Then, you want printf or sprintf. sprintf "%o", $num will take a number and return a string that is the octal representation of that number, printf will print the octal representation instead of returning it.
Together, printf "%o\n", ord "P" will print "120".
