Perl Cookbook

Printing Data Structures

Problem

You want to print out a data structure.

Solution

If the output’s legibility and layout are important, write your own custom printing routine.

If you are in the Perl debugger, use the x command:

DB<1> $reference = [ { "foo" => "bar" }, 3, sub { print "hello, world\n" } ];
DB<2> x $reference

                    0  ARRAY(0x1d033c)
               
                      0  HASH(0x7b390)
               
                         'foo' = 'bar'>
               
                      1  3
               
                      2  CODE(0x21e3e4)
               
                         - & in ???>

From within your own programs, use the Dumper function from the CPAN module Data::Dumper:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper($reference);

Discussion

Sometimes you’ll want to make a dedicated function for your data structure that delivers a particular output format, but often this is overkill. If you’re running under the Perl debugger, the x and X commands provide nice pretty-printing. The x command is more useful because it works on both global and lexical variables, whereas X only works on globals. Pass x a reference to the data structure you want to print.

D<1> x \@INC

                    0  ARRAY(0x807d0a8)
               
                       0  '/home/tchrist/perllib' 
               
                       1  '/usr/lib/perl5/i686-linux/5.00403'
               
                       2  '/usr/lib/perl5' 
               
                       3  '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/i686-linux' 
               
                       4  '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl' 
               
                       5  '.'
               

These commands use the dumpvar.pl library. Here’s an example:

{ package main; require "dumpvar.pl" } 
*dumpvar = \&main::dumpvar if __PACKAGE_ _ ne 'main';
dumpvar("main", "INC");             # show both @INC and %INC

The dumpvar.pl library isn’t a module, but we wish it were—so we cajole it into exporting its dumpvar function anyway. The first two ...