[Bioperl-l] storing/retrieving a large hash on file system?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Tue, 18 May 2010 10:28:06 -0500, Ben wrote:

> is there a 'best practice' way to do something like this?

The only one I can think of is "Don't make up your own format unless you
really, really have to".

> I could save a tab-delimited file, which is human readable, but does
> not represent the structure of the hash, so I would need code to
> re-parse it. I assume I could probably do something along the lines of
> dumping a JSON string, then read/decode it. this is easy, but not so
> human-readable. is there another option i'm not thinking of? what do
> others do in this sort of situation?

I would use YAML or JSON if I had to look at it "by hand" or if it had
to be somehow portable. I would prefer those over CSV, which hasn't
necessarily got well-defined handling of special chars, whitespace etc.

If speed is more important, I think the Storable module is quite a bit
quicker, but the format is "binary".


  Best regards,

    Adam

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                                                          Adam Sjøgren
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