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in reply to Cheap idioms

If I'm ever in the position where I need to slurp a file I'll go with IO::File's handy getcontents() method
my $contents = IO::File->new($filename)->getcontents();
I'm not sure how that benchmarks, but I'm of the opinion that it looks much more elegant ;)
HTH

_________
broquaint

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Re^2: Cheap idioms
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Oct 14, 2002 at 11:04 UTC

    It looks very neat indeed, but it loads over 1,000 lines of Perl code and an XS module in dependencies.. in a short(!) CGI script I wouldn't want that - but that's always a difficult environment. It's too much to type in a oneliner also, but that too is a special case.

    For a large, "proper" script it is too brief - you run the risk of bombing out with a Can't call method "getcontents" on an undefined value since you don't check whether new() succeeded.. it would have to look maybe like this:

    my $contents = do { my $fh = IO::File->new($filename) or die "Failed to open $filename +: $!"; $fh->getcontents(); }
    And now it doesn't look so neat anymore. :-( Juerd's idiom on the other hand has builtin error reporting.

    Makeshifts last the longest.