in reply to Detecting packed data

In the general case the answer is no. Intuitively, think about:

$a = 17;

[download]
Is $a packed ? Under the hood, in its binary representation it's probably just-another-integer that "looks packed".

Though in general you can't say, don't despair. Your case can be more specific... Maybe there's something special about *your* data that will make it stand out ?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Detecting packed data
by tilly (Archbishop) on Apr 10, 2005 at 19:30 UTC
    You are wrong about what it looks like under the hood in Perl. You would be right in C. (The difference being that in Perl every scalar has a ton of structure associated with it.)
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom