If the questioner is unaware of how to use perldoc, and most questioners indeed are, then your post amounts to saying, You are a moron for not doing something you don't know how to do. Why didn't you look up documentation you probably don't know how to find?

That is an absolutely and utterly useless thing to say. Here is a much better way at getting across the basic point you had:

It looks like you may not have read the documentation for DBI. If you know about it, take this as advice that you should try understanding that before asking questions. If you don't know how to find the documentation try typing perldoc DBI at the command line. To try to find out about a specific thing type </code>/execute</code> and you should jump right there.

An alternative that many people like to use is the documentation at the website http://www.perldoc.com. Note, however, that using this is slower, and using any kind of online documentation means you always have to worry about whether you are reading documentation for a different version of the software than what you have installed locally.

Do you see? The same basic diagnosis. Answering it takes about the same energy as what you did. The answer is far less likely to leave the other person thinking you think they are stupid. And in the likely scenario that they don't have the basic toolkit that you take for granted, the answer will be useful.

In reply to Re (tilly) 2: Getting MySQL Data into an Array. by tilly
in thread Getting MySQL Data into an Array. by cdherold

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