[sf-perl] $Data::Dumper::Useqq

David Alban extasia at extasia.org
Tue May 13 13:34:12 PDT 2008


greetings,

sending this in case you've made the same mistaken assumption i made...

by default, Data::Dumper will print the empty string for non-printable
characters.  you have to set $Data::Dumper::Useqq to true to have it
render non-printable characters.  when it does this, it prints them as
escaped octal numbers.  note that under certain circumstances it will
print ascii nul as a single escaped zero and under others, as an
escaped string of three zeroes.

$ perl -MData::Dumper -de 1

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.27
Editor support available.

Enter h or `h h' for help, or `man perldebug' for more help.

main::(-e:1):   1
  DB<1> x $Data::Dumper::Useqq
0  0
  DB<2> print Dumper chr 0
$VAR1 = '';

  DB<3> $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1

  DB<4> !2
print Dumper chr 0
$VAR1 = "\0";

  DB<5> $x = "\x00" . '0'

  DB<6> print Dumper $x
$VAR1 = "\0000";

it mildly disturbs me that if you don't know about Useqq you'll see
values printed without any non-printable characters they might
contain.  but then i didn't write Data::Dumper and am not sure what i
might have done differently.

anyway, don't assume what i assumed. :-)

david
-- 
Live in a world of your own, but always welcome visitors.


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