I use the JSON module, but only use the decode_json function:

[metacpan.org...]

The .tar.gz download is 92kb, but I'm not sure how big the uncompressed file is.

I use it like:

use JSON;

$jsonArr = false;
if ($json_string) {
 eval { $jsonArr = decode_json $json_string };
}

if ($jsonArr) {
 for (@{$jsonArr}) {
  $pic = $_->{'name'};
  $uuid = $_->{'uuid'};

  # do stuff
 }
}

As an alternative, I could accomplish the same thing with:

sub myJSONDecoder {
 my @finalArr;
 $_ = $_[0];

 s/^\s*\[\s*{\s*|\s*}\s*\]\s*$//g;

 my @firstArr = split(/\s*}\s*,\s*{/);

 for ($i = 0; $i <= $#firstArr; $i++) {
  my @secondArr = split(/\s*,\s*/, $firstArr[$i]);

  for (@secondArr) {

   # I recognize that this next regex would break if there's a ' inside of a " or
   # vice versa. That's not an issue for my usage, but YMMV
   s/["']//g;

   my @thirdArr = split(':');

   $finalArr[$i]{$thirdArr[0]} = $thirdArr[1];
  }
 }

 return @finalArr;
}

@jsonArr = myJSONDecoder($json_string);

for (@jsonArr) {
 $pic = $_->{'name'};
 $uuid = $_->{'uuid'};

 # do stuff
}

That's 377 bytes instead of 92,000. Or more like 296 if I change the variable names strategically, I just used explanatory names to make it more understandable for this post.

Is there a reason to stick with the module? I know that 4 expressions in my function would be a tad slow to process, but does that offset the time it would take to load the much larger module that, for all I know, may have its own expressions?

Are modules by nature faster to process? Or is it just that it will be more likely to be stable?