Did you try to provide \*STDOUT or simply *STDOUT instead of a filename to see if it just works, magically and by chance? ;-)

Of course you can also write a wishlist bug report against the appropriate module, and hope for a friendly CPAN author.

++!

it really is as simple as

$movie->save(*STDOUT);
[download]

I had no idea you could do that! I'm not even sure exactly what's going on there, some light reading for me this weekend then!

Thanks, Rob

---
my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.

SWF::BinStream::File allows writing to a file handle, so use IO::Scalar to create a file handle that writes to a string and then you can print the string.

I've not tested this code but something along these lines may do what you want.

use SWF::File;
use IO::Scalar;

my $swf_data = '';
my $swf_fh = IO::Scalar->new( \$swf_data );
my $swf = SWF::BinStream::Write->new($swf_fh);
...
$swf->close();
close $swf_fh;
print $swf_data;
[download]

Yep, I realise this (and you have inferred correctly that I intend to serve the built object as an http response), but that doesn't answer my question.

I'll be able to print the header okay, it's the binary data which forms the built swf object that I can't see how to get hold of (other than saving it to disk with a temp name, reading it, printing the contents in the response and then deleting the file, ug!)

---
my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.