----------------------------------------------------------------- [Please enter your report here] I have encountered a situation where the output of Data::Dumper cannot be incorporated in a script to restore the original data, specifically where a string contains the sequence ^M^J and $Useqq is unset. Please find attached a script which illustrates the problem. (Note: this arises in my work because I have packed numbers in a large data structure, and on a few occasions the packed sequence happens to include ^M^J as a subsequence.) The issue arises because perl seems to have a "friendly" way to handle DOS files on Unix platforms. My guess is that at a really early stage of reading the script file, ^M^J is translated to ^J, presumably before perl is even parsing the input. Obviously, it is ignoring the single quotes in this example, since the single quotes should suppress any interpretation of the input. (Note that I realize this is generally a desirable behaviour, so I think the bug is with Data::Dumper, not with how files are read.) Note also that, as my script shows, this is not a problem when we use eval on the output of dump, but only when the code is saved to a file a compiled back from the file. (Unfortunately for me, I wish to save the dump to a file for frequent reuse, so that doesn't help me much...) An obvious solution is to set $Useqq to 1, but it seems to me this module ought to output correct code in all cases, so I'm still submitting this as a bug report. A somewhat ugly solution is to use something like this: Replace 'stuff^M^Jmorestuff' by 'stuff' . "\r\n" . 'morestuff' I don't really like it, but I can't think of any other way to get around the fact that single quotes don't permit any escape sequences (other than \\ and \'). Here is the script I wrote to illustrate the problem: #!/pkgs/perl-5.006/bin/sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1/perl -w # This short script illustrates a bug with Data::Dumper, where it will # create code that does not correctly reconstruct the data structure # dumped when copied into source code. use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Purity = 1; # This makes no difference my $a = "\x0d\x0a"; print "Initial length: ", length($a), "\n"; my $dump = Data::Dumper->Dump([$a], [qw(a)]); print "Dumped code with Useqq = 0:\n", $dump; eval $dump; print "New length after eval: ", length($a), "\n"; $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1; $dump = Data::Dumper->Dump([$a], [qw(a)]); print "Dumped code with Useqq = 1:\n", $dump; eval $dump; print "New length after eval: ", length($a), "\n"; # This is dump's output when $Useqq = 0. -- Doesn't work! $a = ' '; print "New length after dumped code (with Useqq = 0): ", length($a), "\n"; # This is dump's output when $Useqq = 1. -- Works correctly $a = "\r\n"; print "New length after dumped code (with Useqq = 1): ", length($a), "\n"; [Please do not change anything below this line] -----------------------------------------------------------------