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authorKarl Williamson <public@khwilliamson.com>2012-07-15 17:02:19 -0600
committerKarl Williamson <public@khwilliamson.com>2012-07-19 09:39:06 -0600
commit43d3b06a68c324615c5d1909e183687a40b0bb19 (patch)
treee0864a1de120ff533165f22e6951a2a396e783aa /hv.c
parent5e61c969881a91ac25bbb01c162191a36b939373 (diff)
downloadperl-43d3b06a68c324615c5d1909e183687a40b0bb19.tar.gz
perlapi: Clarify hv_fetch() docs
I was confused by the earlier documentation. Thanks to Leon Timmermans for clarifying, and to Vicent Pitt for most of the wording
Diffstat (limited to 'hv.c')
-rw-r--r--hv.c5
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/hv.c b/hv.c
index ac826f1ff3..c4cf736c72 100644
--- a/hv.c
+++ b/hv.c
@@ -277,7 +277,10 @@ negative the key is assumed to be in UTF-8-encoded Unicode.
Returns the SV which corresponds to the specified key in the hash.
The absolute value of C<klen> is the length of the key. If C<klen> is
negative the key is assumed to be in UTF-8-encoded Unicode. If
-C<lval> is set then the fetch will be part of a store. Check that the
+C<lval> is set then the fetch will be part of a store. This means that if
+there is no value in the hash associated with the given key, then one is
+created and a pointer to it is returned. The C<SV*> it points to can be
+assigned to. But always check that the
return value is non-null before dereferencing it to an C<SV*>.
See L<perlguts/"Understanding the Magic of Tied Hashes and Arrays"> for more