A while ago I started on a data dumper that wasn't designed to be eval-able (like Data::Dumper) but human-readable and - more importantly - accurate.

I've just more-or-less finished the first version which fairly decently meets these goals, by doing a breadth-first walk and making use of B to analyze the data.

An example of what Data::XDumper does:

use Data::XDumper qw(Dump);
sub Test { unshift @_, { y => \@_ }; \@_ }
my $x = "foo";     
my $data = Test($x, substr($x, 1, 2));
bless $data, 'Quux';
bless \$data, 'Bar';
Dump $data, $data;
[download]

with default settings produces the output:

$L001:  Bar \
@L003:     Quux @(
              {y => \@L003},
$L002:        'foo',
              substr($L002, 1, 2)
           )
        $L001

Here are direct links to the sources: Data::XDumper 1.03 and its prerequisite B::More 1.01. You can also browse them at CPAN.

•Update: found a major memory leak, fixed Feb 20 13:11:50 CET 2003 in 1.03

And a syntax-highlighted version for online reading (also updated)

I hope I can get some feedback on my approach and layout, and I need to know how robust it is. I've tried all kinds of input but the possibilities are endless, so perhaps other people can find things it breaks on.

•Update: what I mean with the above paragraph is: Could you please run the most disgusting piece of data you can think of through XDumper and report the results? :-)