...
- It is the only approach which allows you to directly serialize the nested hash strcture to file and back through a seamless interface.
- It is implemented in C which should give some performance advantage over the other two modules implemented in Perl.
I I have already tested this approach in JKFlow and it successfully marshalls and unmarshalls the complex nested hash based data strcutures in JKFlow by simply passing a reference to the root of the nested structure to its component sub-routines. Follwoing is the description of how to use the module.
Usage of the Storable Module
Storable is a C extension module for serializing data directly to files and is the fastest of the three approaches. The store function takes a reference to a data structure (the root) and the name of a file. The retrieve method does the converse: given a filename, it returns the root:
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use Storable;
$a = [100, 200, {'foo' => 'bar'}];
eval {
store($a, 'test.dat');
};
print "Error writing to file: $@" if $@;
$a = retrieve('test.dat');
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If you have more than one structure to stuff into a file, simply put all of them in an anonymous array and pass this array's reference to store.
You can pass an open filehandle to store_fd instead of giving a filename to store. The functions nstore and nstore_fd can be used for storing the data in "network" order, making the data machine-independent. When you use retrieve or retrieve_fd, the data is automatically converted back to the native machine format (while storing, the module storesa flag indicating whether it has stored it in a machine-independent format or not).