DBI::st appears to re-use internally an arrayref (I just got bitten by this today). You will have to store the record yourself: 

my $first = undef;

while (my $record = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref) {
  unless (defined $first) { @{$first} = @{$record} }
  # other stuff
}

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..although I'm unclear as to why you can't just stop retrieving records after the first, or why you can't just use a 'limit 1' clause in your SQL.

Also my DBI doesn't define a fetch method on statement handles, only fetchrow_* and fetchall_*, so you may need to re-jig my example.


Update: jZed++ for pointing out fetch is an alias for fetchrow_arrayref. Thanks, I've managed to miss that in every reading of perldoc DBI.

In reply to Re: Saving array reference by moot
in thread Saving array reference by mhearse

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