I suspect the "octal string" is printing 'k' and so on because ... I think I can assume I have a utf-8 encoded byte array, and try and work with that. I've been using the ctypes module in Python ...

Here's my problem: I need to scan through the byte array returned by decrypting a .pdf and replace some hard-coded values in the file before sending it along to a servlet response.<BR><BR>In Perl ...