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

I went looking for the same thing and found this lovely little Perl function, explicitly meant to generate results like print_r().

The author of the script was asking your exact question in a forum here.

print objectToString($json_data);

Gives this output:

HASH {
time                             => 1233173875
error                            => 0
node                             => HASH {
    vid                              => 1011
    moderate                         => 0
    field_datestring                 => ARRAY {
        HASH {
            value                            => August 30, 1979
        }
    }

    field_tagged_persons             => ARRAY {
        HASH {
            nid                              => undef
        }
    }

...and so on...