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Undumping Perlby haukex (Archbishop) |
on Jul 03, 2016 at 18:27 UTC ( [id://1167085]=CUFP: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Respected Monks, I'd like to present to you today, in hopes you might find it interesting or even useful, the result of scratching an itch I had for quite some time: parsing Perl data structures without eval; instead I do it with the great module PPI. The result is Config::Perl. A nice additional benefit is that the module can round-trip much of the output of Data::Dumper, for which I provide the helper module Data::Undump::PPI. Let me demonstrate with code:
Here's what it looks like when you read that file and display the resulting data structure:
Which outputs (whitespace edited for brevity):
As you can see, Config::Perl returns a kind of "symbol table" for the parsed data structure. Data::Undump::PPI makes round-tripping Perl data structures to and from strings (and files, see below) easier:
In the above example, @parsed now looks identical to @input, and is essentially a deep copy. Another example: Let's say you want to save some application state and restore it later - yesterday I released v0.06 which adds some helpful features, such as a helper for Data::Dumper called Dump (which sets up several Data::Dumper options) and the ability to read / write files directly:
Having said all that, the modules are definitely not perfect (yet ;-)). There are of course many features of Perl that aren't supported (I'd end up re-implementing Perl otherwise), there's a list at the end of the Config::Perl documentation. As a result I currently often can't parse the output of, for example, Data::Dump, since that uses things like lexical variables or the range operator. Maybe I'll add support for those later. Data::Undump::PPI seems to work fairly well as far as I can tell at the moment; the two notable things that aren't supported are deserializing objects (because Config::Perl doesn't support bless, although that might be possible in the future), and code references (for hopefully obvious reasons: without eval I'd have to re-implement Perl...). So if you get a chance to play around with the modules, I'd be happy to hear your (constructive) feedback, bug reports, and so on :-) Regards,
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