On 11 May 2007, at 17:57, Lionel MARTIN wrote:
Lionel MARTIN wrote:
- Don't load large amounts of data into scalars.
Fine. Now I know why. But sometimes, you don't have the choice.
I'd like to know what situations you encounter where you are
forced to load
large amounts of data into scalars. I can't think of any.
I don't have any clear situations right here in mind, but we could
imagine many:
-for example, a bulletin board system, where you are retrieving
posted message from a DB. Each message could weigh several dozens
of kilo. (especially if you store HTML formatting in the DB)
Yeah, but presumably you'd store those in a data structure of some
sort rather than a scalar. Any non-trivial data structure (for
example an object...) will mean you're automatically using references
rather than storing the data directly in lexical (or global) scalars.
-another example hat comes to my mind is a project (implemented in
PHP) where I had to work. Part of the process was retrieving cached
HTML template pages from the server and do BB tags parsing before
serving the client. Of course, you would tell me that I could
retrieve the data chunk by chunk, but this is not as obvious, as
some BB tags could spread over several lines. So, this would need
to devise an algorithm to be sure we are not cutting in the middle
of a tag. In this kind of situation and if the file to be retrieved
don't grow too large, I would prefer to retrieve the file all at
once, do the processing, serve it to the client, and then, undef
the buffer. Far easier than doing chunk by chunk.
Same thing: you'd presumably wrap that data in an object.
--
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
