I seem to be unable to convey my intention. I already did what you suggested. My library can be used to convert the binary data into a JSON representation (parse) and also to convert a JSON-representation into binary (serialize). These are 2 separate process steps that do not need to be executed back-to-back.

I'm not trying to figure out how to prevent concurrent access. I'm just not sure whether it's better to access the binary data as a simple file handle, as a scalar or as a memory-backed file handle.

But I may already have my answer: Since I'm not developing for embedded devices I'm not memory-constrained and should just load the full file into memory. (Option 'b' or 'c') Since I'm already using read, seek, tell, print to access the bits and bytes I should then go for Option 'c'.

In reply to Re^4: Deciding for a file access method - requesting opinions by Monk::Thomas
in thread Deciding for a file access method - requesting opinions by Monk::Thomas

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