Re: Suggestion for dbm functions

On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > > I suggest thet the two functions dbmstore and dbmfetch take any variably > > type as parameter instead of only strings so that you can store any data > > type, even arrays and objects. This would indeed make the dbm functions > > usable for more purposes. > > > > I have only gdbm available here, but from the documentation supplied, I > > know that you can easily store binary data and not just strings. > > > > Making this change would even not break existing php3 sources, as strings > > would still be strings. > > I don't think it makes much sense to make this specific to the dbm > functions. There are already functions that take any PHP data structure > and convert it to a string and back. See the serialize() function, for > example. Well, much space could be saved by using a binary representation instead of the string representation. Also, parsing a string must be less efficient. Finally, the format that serialize() uses seems for me to have much overhead. An array of 6 integers take up (at least) 50 bytes. That is when I use small integer values. Higher values (10 digit for example) makes the overhead would be much worse. /Lars Christensen larsch@cs.auc.dk http://www.cs.auc.dk/~larsch -- PHP Development Mailing List http://www.php.net/ To unsubscribe send an empty message to php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For help: php-dev-help@lists.php.net