in reply to Subtle(?) issue(?) with lvalues and serialization

Rather than passing an array of lvalue refs, I'd pass a string of numeric pairs that characterise those substrings; and then create the substrings (or references to them), on the other side.

Ie. Pass $substrs = '10,4 15,3 20,32 ...'; and on the other side unpack them and create/process your substrings:

doWhatever( substr( $bigString, $_->[0], $_->[1] ) ) for map[ split ',
+', $_ ], split ' ', $substrs;

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It may seem crude, but a packed string takes far less space than an array containing the same numbers and unless your big string is greater than 64k (ie offsets greater than 16-bits) then packing to variable length ascii saves space over packing to fixed length binary with pack.

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