Question

What’s the programmatic equivalent of the perl debugger’s x command?

IOW, what’s the function x such that the line

print x( $myvar );

in a Perl script will result in output with the same format as that produced by

DB<2> x $myvar

in the perl debugger?

(NOTE: I’m aware of Data::Dumper, and it is not what I’m looking for; IOW, I’m explicitly ruling it out; D::D‘s formatting differs from that produced by the debugger’s x, and I prefer the latter.)

Answer 1

I believe you are looking for the routines in dumpvar.pl, which you will find in the same directory as your perl5db.pl file (cf. perldoc -l perl5db.pl).

Example:

require "dumpvar.pl";
dumpValue( { foo => 123, bar => "qwerty" } );

Produces:

'bar' => 'qwerty'
'foo' => 123