Question

I have a Perl program that reads in a bunch of data, munges it, and then outputs several different file formats. I’d like to make Perl be one of those formats (in the form of a .pm package) and allow people to use the munged data within their own Perl scripts.

Printing out the data is easy using Data::Dump::pp.

I’d also like to print some helper functions to the resulting package.

What’s an easy way to print a multi-line string without variable substitution?

I’d like to be able to do:

print <<EOL;
  sub xyz { 
    my $var = shift;
  }
EOL

But then I’d have to escape all of the $’s.

Is there a simple way to do this? Perhaps I can create an actual sub and have some magic pretty-printer print the contents? The printed code doesn’t have to match the input or even be legible.

Answer 1

Try writing your code as an actual perl subroutine, then using B::Deparse to get the source code at runtime.