Bit stream (perl question)

Hey there,

I have a program which opens bitmap files and prints the content to screen, the code is below...

Code:

---

#!c:/Perl/bin/Perl.exe

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "Read a bitmap\n\n";

open (file, "try.bmp") || die("This file could not be opened");
binmode(file,":raw");
while(<file>){
$string .= $_;

}
close(file);

print $string;
print "\nBitmap read";

---

The next stage is to have the output as the bit stream as I am opening monochrone bitmaps which I believe from the documentation I have read is a 0 and 1, x by y grid with a 54 byte header, I have tried using sprinf("%b", $string); and various other method but to no avail.

Any help on this matter would be great, thank you.

unpack 'B*', $string;