Re: Reading a hash structure stored in a file

[davido]

JSON, YAML, INI, TOML, XML... these are all serialization and data interchange formats. JSON, and YAML are particularly lightweight for representing datastructures such as hashes, arrays, and nested structures.

Are you committed due to some immutable legacy technical debt to using Perl files to store your data? Could you possibly adopt a more secure, simpler format such as JSON? JSON is popular because it is simple, and if treated as data (ie, not evaled by a Javascript engine as code) is fairly secure, in that it won't be exposing your code to injected code.

Perl supports JSON and YAML quite easily using modules from CPAN, and since Perl 5.14 JSON is even supported in the Perl core distribution via JSON::PP

[johngg]

It's interesting to see that JSON::PP is now the Perl core but I wonder why it doesn't seem to be listed as a core module on http://perldoc.perl.org. I wonder if there are other useful modules that are now core but have been omitted from the documentation.

[hippo]

That does seem quite the oversight, since corelist reports it was first shipped with perl v5.13.9.

You may be interested in perldoc.pl as an alternative source of info as it does list this module in core and was discussed in the Monastery last year. See perldoc.pl - An alternative to perldoc.perl.org.

[haukex]

I wonder if there are other useful modules that are now core but have been omitted from the documentation.

HTTP::Tiny is another one. http://perldoc.perl.org is also still stuck on 5.26.1 as the highest version...

At the moment I'm not even sure where the current repo for the site is. https://github.com/jonallen/perldoc.perl.org and https://github.com/perlorg/perldoc.perl.org both had their last commits in 2016.