Packing and Unpacking Data

packing and unpacking of data occurs in some computer languages as a means of grouping the data together, or reducing its size, or both.

Examples

 * the Perl language has built-in capability to pack data of various kinds into a string of text via the pack/unpack or the join/split pairs of Perl functions. There may be other languages that provide this sort of thing directly, and it can be programmed in many additional languages that do not have native operations.
 * a number of Cryptography commands exist for Unix-like systems; these also function to pack and unpack their data.