unpack and trailing whitespace in strings

[Jonathan McKeown]

perlfunc says unpack 'A*' strips trailing spaces and nulls.

It appears (in 5.8.6 and 5.8.7 at least) to strip all trailing whitespace:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $packed = pack 'a*', "A string\n\t";
{
  local $\ = "#\n";
  print unpack 'A*', $packed;
  print unpack 'a*', $packed;
}
__END__

produces:

A string#
A string
	#

Which surprised me.

Jonathan