I'm really curious why Data::Dumper doesn't show the 0-bytes?

It does :) its your browser/editor/shell that doesn't actually display them (non-printable), and in some cases doesn't actually copy/paste them

Data::Dump does useqq-type-deal by default, and in a step of brilliance exports a dd kinda like this one

sub dd {
  use Data::Dumper;
  print Data::Dumper->new([@_])->Sortkeys(1)
    ->Indent(1)->Useqq(1)->Dump . "\n";
}
[download]

I'm really tired of typing print Dumper();... say Dumper()... so nowadays I have -MData::Dump=dd,pp in my PERL5OPT