Perl 5.16.3 and 5.10.0 on MacBook Snow Leopard.

Dear Masters of Puissance,

Is there a way to write an array or a hash to a file for later fast retrieval? I'm playing with dictionaries, and the slowest part of the operation is reading it in (yes, I've profiled it).

More specifically, I have a hash whose key is the sorted letters in a word (as an aside, sorting those letters with split/sort/join is about 1/3rd of the running time) and the value is, wait for it, a reference to an anonymous list of its anagrams.

It would be cool if the hash thus constructed could be dumped out to a file, for immediate reloading next time around. I understand that whatever technique is chosen would be heavily Perl-dependant, but it would be a simple matter to detect this, e.g. a header indicating the Perl used to create it, and rebuilding it.

Tied variables seem to suggest themselves, but I can't quite grok them (I've been a C programmer far longer than I've been a Perl programmer, and I really love Perl!).

Ta muchly.

-- Dave

In reply to Saving a hash/array to a file by davehorsfall

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