view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

lib/AddressBook/DB/BBDB.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

 ("nadine.and.henry@pobox.com"        The net addresses - a list of strings
  "maztravel@maztravel.com")
 ((creation-date . "1999-09-02")      The notes field - a list of alists
  (timestamp . "1999-10-17")
  (notes . "Always split aces and eights")
  (birthday "6/15")
 )
 nil                                  The cache vector - always nil
 ]

After this is decoded it will be returned as a reference to a BBDB
object.  The internal structure of the BBDB object mimics the lisp
structure of the BBDB string.  It consists of a reference to an array
with 9 elements The Data::Dumper output of the above BBDB string would
just replaces all of the ()s with []s.  It can be accessed by using
the C<$bbdb->part('all')> method.

=head2 Methods

=over 4

lib/AddressBook/DB/BBDB.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

=head1 SEE ALSO

BBDB texinfo documentation

=cut


=head1 BUGS

Phone numbers and zip codes may be converted from strings to integers
if they are decoded and encoded.  This should not affect the operation
of BBDB.  Also a null last name is converted from "" to nil, which
also doesn't hurt anything.

You might ask why I use arrays instead of hashes to encode the data in
the BBDB file.  The answer is that order matters in the bbdb file, and
order isn't well defined in hashes.  Also, if you use hashes, at least
in the simple minded way, you can easily find yourself with legitimate
duplicate keys.