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Open Has a New Trick

by Zaxo (Archbishop)
on Oct 02, 2002 at 18:20 UTC ( [id://202343]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

I was poking around in Perl 5.8.0's core module library, and turned up a new form of open that I hadn't heard about. It happens in lib/5.8.0/{arch}/PerlIO/scalar.pm

Something I've occasionally wanted to do is to attach a file handle to a string as an accessor. That has been possible with earlier perl using IO::Scalar or IO::Stringy, but not all filehandle semantics and conventions were honored. I found that that is native in 5.8.0 with PerlIO, and that the syntax is as simple as could be imagined: open FILEHANDLE, MODE, SCALARREF.

That's it - give open a reference to the string in the file name slot, and it works. The handle may be read, written, or appended. Globals like $/ work as expected.

Here's a sledgehammer-on-peanut example which prints a string in cable-ese (upper case, suppressed spaces, five letter groups):

my $foo= 'Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their + country'; { local $\ = " "; local $/ = \5; $foo =~ tr/ //d; open my $fh, '<', \$foo; print uc while <$fh>; }

As an output file:

my $foo; $_ = "She sells sea shells by the sea shore"; { local $\ = $/; open my $fh, '>', \$foo; print $fh $_ for split; } print $foo;

Append, capturing STDERR:

my $oops; open STDERR, '>>', \$oops;

I've only started to explore this trick. I haven't tried flock or seek/tell or $.. I haven't tinkered with truncate or exotic modes.

Here's a challenge. Can you find any limits to file-like behavior? What cool uses can you think of for this?

After Compline,
Zaxo

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Re: Open Has a New Trick
by rob_au (Abbot) on Oct 02, 2002 at 21:55 UTC
    I found this feature in the 5.8.0rc2 and made comment on it as a means by which to perform temporary file-type operations within memory space in this follow-up comment to my tutorial on Using Temporary Files in Perl.

    Another nifty feature in 5.8.0 to do with the open function and temporary files is the creation of anonymous file handles. For example:

    open( $fh, '+>', undef ) || die $!;

    Where the undefined value is a literal undef statement, rather than an undefined variable. This syntax will open a file handle and where permitted by the file system, unlink the file while holding it open. The result is an anonymous STDIO stream which will be lost when the file handle is closed.

    Note too that this anonymous file handle functionality is also available through the File::Temp module which has been incorporated into the core 5.8.0 distribution.

     

    perl -e 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000000111000110")),"\n"'

Re: Open Has a New Trick
by Felonious (Chaplain) on Oct 02, 2002 at 19:18 UTC
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