/ 
Storable-0.1
River stage five • 621 direct dependents • 33730 total dependents
/ Storable

NAME

Storable - persistency for perl data structures

SYNOPSIS

use Storable;
store \%table, 'file';
$hashref = retrieve('file');

DESCRIPTION

The Storable package brings you persistency for your perl data structures containing SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH or REF objects, i.e. anything that can be convenientely stored to disk and retrieved at a later time.

It can be used in the regular procedural way by calling store with a reference to the object to store, and providing a file name. The routine returns undef for I/O problems or other internal error, a true value otherwise. Serious errors are propagated as a die exception.

To retrieve data stored to disk, you use retrieve with a file name, and the objects stored into that file are recreated into memory for you, and a reference to the root object is returned. In case an I/O error occurred while reading, undef is returned instead. Other serious errors are propagated via die.

Since storage is performed recursively, you might want to stuff references to objects that share a lot of common data into a single array or hash table, and then store that object. That way, when you retrieve back the whole thing, the objects will continue to share what they originally shared.

At the cost of a slight header overhead, you may store to an already opened file descriptor using the store_fd routine, and retrieve from a file via retrieve_fd. Those names aren't imported by default, so you will have to do that explicitely if you need those routines. The file descriptor name you supply must be fully qualified.

When using retrieve_fd, objects are retrieved in sequence, one object (i.e. one recursive tree) per associated store_fd.

If you're more from the object-oriented camp, you can inherit from Storable and directly store your objects by invoking store as a method.

SPEED

The heart of Storable is written in C for decent speed. Extra low-level optimization have been made when manipulating perl internals, to sacrifice encapsulation for the benefit of a greater speed.

Storage is usually faster than retrieval since the latter has to allocate the objects from memory and perform the relevant I/Os, whilst the former mainly performs I/Os.

On my HPUX machine, I can store 200K in 0.8 seconds, and I can retrieve the same data in 1.1 seconds, approximatively.

WARNING

If you're using references as keys within your hash tables, you're bound to disapointment when retrieving your data. Indeed, Perl stringifies references used as hash table keys. If you later wish to access the items via another reference stringification (i.e. using the same reference that was used for the key originally to record the value into the hash table), it will work because both references stringify to the same string.

It won't work accross a store and retrieve operations however, because the addresses in the retrieved objects, which are part of the stringified references, will probably differ from the original addresses. The topology of your structure is preserved, but not hidden semantics like those.

BUGS

You can't store GLOB, CODE, FORMLINE, etc... If you can define semantics for those operations, feel free to enhance Storable so that it can deal with those.

Due to the aforementionned optimizations, Storable is at the mercy of perl's internal redesign or structure changes. If that bothers you, you can try convincing Larry that what is used in Storable should be documented and consistently kept in future revisions. As I said, you may try.

AUTHOR

Raphael Manfredi <ram@hptnos02.grenoble.hp.com>