[Hartford-pm] sprintf sign handling question?

[Bob Mariotti]

Fellow mongers;

I've been researching and playing with this issue all day.  Sometimes 
its time to ask those who know.

I have a perl program that extracts data from a report file.  Some of 
the fields (columns) are monetary with a trailing sign (i.e: 1,234.56-).
I extract the fields with the unpack function into scalars then strip 
out the commas.  If the field ends with a '-' char then I subtract the 
scalar from zero placing it back into itself.

Next I create a string output record with the pack function and load the 
fields with the sprintf function.  Finally I write the formatted string 
to a file.  Simple, huh?

OK - I am getting what looks like a properly formatted file.  However, I 
am having problems with sign handling.  Can anyone please offer 
suggestions to help me arrive at the following:

input field:    1,234.56-
getting output:	-00123456
Desired output: 00123456-
or preferably:  x'30303132333435d6' which is a zoned ascii decimal field 
with a negating overstrike on the low order byte.

Suggestions please?

Thanks all.

Bob
Hartford PM