Question

I’ve occasionally had problems with strings being subtly different, in some cases utf8::all changed the behavior, so I assume the subtle differences are unicode. I’d like to dump strings in such a way that the differences will be visual to me. What are my options for doing this?

Answer 1

I recommend the Dump function in the Devel::Peek module in the Perl core:

$ perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump "abc"'
SV = PV(0x10441500) at 0x10491680
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADTMP,POK,READONLY,pPOK)
  PV = 0x10442224 "abc"\0
  CUR = 3
  LEN = 4

$ perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump "\x{FEFF}abc"'
SV = PV(0x10441050) at 0x10443be0
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADTMP,POK,READONLY,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x10449bc0 "\357\273\277abc"\0 [UTF8 "\x{feff}abc"]
  CUR = 6
  LEN = 8

(You see how FLAGS contains UTF8 in the second example, because of the wide character, but not in the first?)