-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.
OK.
Basically, I would use an object here, containing why not a scalar member.
This way, when the reference to the object goes out of scope, the memory
associated to the object would be freed as well.
Finally, that's a devious way of doing what I was suggesting at the
beginning: use a lexical variable (a scalar) and undef it.
Wrapping that in an object would make the whole lot automatic (if I'm not
mistaking).
Lionel.
