Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there an easy way to tell the size of a scalar (preferably in bytes)?

And while I'm thinking of it, if I go grab a file over HTTP using LWP::UserAgent, is there an easy way to tell the size of what I downloaded?

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Re: Size of scalar in bytes
by hardburn (Abbot) on Nov 17, 2003 at 17:41 UTC

    Is there an easy way to tell the size of a scalar (preferably in bytes)?

    use bytes;
my $len = length $var;

    [download]

    And while I'm thinking of it, if I go grab a file over HTTP using LWP::UserAgent, is there an easy way to tell the size of what I downloaded?

    Servers should (but aren't required) to send a Content-Length header. If the server didn't send it, then there isn't a way you can tell the size until you've already downloaded it. Most servers will send that header, but you should code in such a way that it gracefully handles the lack of Content-Length.

    ----
    I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
    -- Schemer

    : () { :|:& };:

    Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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Re: Size of scalar in bytes
by ysth (Canon) on Nov 17, 2003 at 17:55 UTC 
    $chars = length($scalar);  # length in characters
# what you probably were looking for

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    $bytes = do {use bytes; length($scalar)} # length in bytes
# bytes may be != chars for unicode strings

    [download]
    $approx_memory_used =Devel::Size::size($scalar) # including perl's overhead
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