I am using Data::Dumper::Dumper()
method. The output is good, but can be made little compact and more good looking.
How I can control it? What are the better alternatives?
I am using Data::Dumper::Dumper()
method. The output is good, but can be made little compact and more good looking.
How I can control it? What are the better alternatives?
Take a look at Data::Dump for something similar to Data::Dumper but arguably better at pretty printing.
Edit (20120304): I had completely forgotten this question, but it was upvoted today and that jogged my memory. If I had to recommend anything today (3 years later) for pretty printing in Perl, I would certainly go with Data::Printer. From Data::Printer's own Rationale:
Data::Dumper is a fantastic tool, meant to stringify data structures in a way they are suitable for being
eval
'ed back in.The thing is, a lot of people keep using it (and similar ones, like Data::Dump) to print data structures and objects on screen for inspection and debugging, and while you can use those modules for that, it doesn't mean mean you should.
This is where Data::Printer comes in. It is meant to do one thing and one thing only: display Perl variables and objects on screen, properly formatted (to be inspected by a human)
If you want to serialize output for storage (rather than for display), take a look at Storable's freeze()
and thaw()
. I cringe whenever I see Data::Dumper being used to save data structures in a DB or cache. :(
I normally use Data::Dump::Streamer, but as the others said, only when the options to Data::Dumper aren't enough.
One alternative* to Data::Dumper would be JSON and its Perl implementation JSON.
* Whether it is better is up to you to decide.
One option is to use Data::Dumper::Perltidy which is a (more or less) drop-in replacement for Data::Dumper::Dumper() but which uses Perltidy to format the output.
If you're just looking for dump output: Smart::Comments
.
You just use
it.
use Smart::Commments;
And then you put any simple variable in a three-hash comment, like so:
my $v = black_box_process();
### $v
And it dumps it out in almost the prettiest print possible.
You can also manage more complex expressions like so:
### ( $a && ( $b ^ ( $c || $d ))) : ( $a && ( $b ^ ( $c || $d )))
But you have to watch it for "colon paths".
### $My::Package::variable
or
### %My::Package::
has never worked in my experience. If I want them to work then I need something like this:
my %stash = %My::Package::;
### %stash
It also does a number of other cute tricks, which you can see if you read the documentation.
Data::Dumper::Concise is another possibility.
use Data::Dumper::Concise;
warn Dumper($var);
is equivalent to:
use Data::Dumper;
{
local $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;
local $Data::Dumper::Indent = 1;
local $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1;
local $Data::Dumper::Deparse = 1;
local $Data::Dumper::Quotekeys = 0;
local $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
warn Dumper($var);
}