gnats perl module

[Mike Hoolehan]

I'm working on a perl interface to gnatsd, to help developers of tie-in
software easily integrate.  I have most of the commands interfaced, but want
to seek your advice on the querying PRs from the database.

I have a Gnats::PR module which represents a PR.  These are the objects that
I'd like returned from a query.  I think I have two main strategies for
creating these PR objects from a query: a) specify 'QFMT FULL' and parse 
the response into a list Gnats::PR objects or b) return a list of Number 
fields, then allow the user to do a getPR() (whatever) on each individual 
number. 

The problem with A) is that it's memory intensive and also I can't figure
out a good way to parse multiple PRs from gnatsd when they're listed in FULL
format (there's no delimiter, for instance).  I like B much better, but my
problem is:  When specifying a QFMT that returns only the bug number, how do
I know what this field is called?  I can guess that it's called 'Number',
but there's no guarantee, is there?  In other words, is there an
installation-generic way of getting the 'Number' fields of PRs that match a
query?

I alluded to this problem in an earlier post about detecting names of
builtins, but received no response.

Thanks for the help,
Mike