On 11 May 2007, at 19:07, Lionel MARTIN wrote:
-another example hat comes to my mind is a project (implemented
in PHP) where I had to work. Part of the process was retrieving
cached HTML template pages from the server and do BB tags
parsing before serving the client. Of course, you would tell me
that I could retrieve the data chunk by chunk, but this is not
as obvious, as some BB tags could spread over several lines. So,
this would need to devise an algorithm to be sure we are not
cutting in the middle of a tag. In this kind of situation and if
the file to be retrieved don't grow too large, I would prefer to
retrieve the file all at once, do the processing, serve it to
the client, and then, undef the buffer. Far easier than doing
chunk by chunk.
Same thing: you'd presumably wrap that data in an object.
OK.
Basically, I would an object here, containing why not a scalar member.
This way, when the reference to the object goes out of scope, the
memory associated to the object would go out of scope as well.
Finally, that's a devious way of doing what I was suggesting at the
beginning: use a lexical variable and undef it.
Wrapping that in an object would make trhe whole lot automatic (if
I'm not mistaking).
Yup, that's it. Basically as soon as there's at least one reference
(either an object handle or just a ref to a hash, scalar or array)
between the scalar and the bulk of the data that memory will be freed
when all the references to it go away.
--
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
