Watch closely as I boggle at your statement. Boggle.

Why, er, how are you working with a table where you don't know what the columns are? I can imagine not knowing the column names in advance if you are writing some generic database code that is expected to work with multiple tables or something like that. I included some code form a project I'm working on that demonstrates such a generic function with some PostgreSQL specific bits added in. The only reason I'd expect jeffa to deprecate 'select * ...' is that you can easily chew up memory if you aren't careful. In my case I get back a single row so there's no problem. Message me if you'd like to see the rest of the code.

# ####################################################################
+##
# Voter::Base Object methods
# ####################################################################
+##

sub populate
  {
    # This function is normally used only by object methods. It takes
    # no arguments and returns a boolean value. It returns false
    # if the object doesn't actually exist.
    # 1 / 0 = $object->populate
    
    # Object method
    # 
    # $_[0] = Voter::...=HASH( ... )
    $_[0]->ERR_PARAMC unless
      ( @_ == 1 and
    ref( $_[0] ) );
    
    # The additional attributes tableoid, oid, xmin, cmin, xmax, cmax,
+ ctid are
    # PostgreSQL specific and exist on every row in every table. They 
+might be
    # interesting so I'm fetching them as well though any actual use o
+f them
    # should take care to use the values correctly upon consultation w
+ith
    # the PostgreSQL documentation.
    my $identity = $_[0]->identity_sql('SELECT');
    
    # Don't just execute this inline - I want to keep the $sth handle 
+around
    my $sth = $_[0]->dbh->prepare( "SELECT tableoid, oid, xmin, cmin, 
+xmax, cmax, ctid, * FROM " .
                   $_[0]->CLASS .
                   " WHERE " .
                   $identity->{exp} );
    $sth->execute( $identity->{val} );
    my $ary = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref;
    
    # Return nothing if the object doesn't exist
    return 0 unless $ary;
    
    # Get the list of attribute names and assign their values as a has
+h slice
    @{$_[0]}{ @{$sth->{NAME_lc}} } = @$ary;
    # that's just assigning an array to a hash slice - except all thro
+ugh
    # references. More prosaicly it might look like
    # @_{ @attributes } = @values
    
    return 1;
  }
[download]

__SIG__
printf "You are here %08x\n", unpack "L!", unpack "P4", pack "L!", B::svref_2object(sub{})->OUTSIDE