in reply to DBI Multidimensional array

Why the insistance on "at once"? Do you mean in a single SQL statement, or a single line of code? How many dimensions? For 2 dimensions it is certainly possible with a single line of code and multiple invocations of a SQL statement (for). If this is not data you are intending to query by (and off hand I don't see how you intend to, RDBMS are not meant for this, or at least for what I am interpreing your vague description as), you could use some form of serialization and store the result as a BLOB.

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perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"