What is Perl's equivalent to PHP's print_r()?

Question

I find print_r in PHP extremely useful, but wonder if there is anything remotely equivalent in Perl?

Answer 1

As usually with Perl, you might prefer alternative solutions to the venerable Data::Dumper:

• Data::Dump::Streamer has a terser output than Data::Dumper, and can also serialize some data better than Data::Dumper,
• YAML (or Yaml::Syck, or an other YAML module) generate the data in YAML, which is quite legible.

And of course with the debugger, you can display any variable with the 'x' command. I particularly like the form 'x 2 $complex_structure' where 2 (or any number) tells the debugger to display only 2 levels of nested data.