Hi Todd,

I see from Need help with loop syntax errors, that you like to experiment. I suggest that you do more of the same with Data::Dumper to empirically see what it does with various data structures.

In general you give Dumper a reference to any arbitrary structure and it figures out how to display it.

Here is some "play" code to get you started:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @data = qw( 7 8 9);
my $dataref = \@data;      #create reference to data array
my $string = 'this is string';

print Dumper \@data;  #dump using reference to @data

=PRINTS
$VAR1 = [
          '7',
          '8',
          '9'
        ];
=cut

print Dumper $dataref; #dump using scalar reference

=PRINTS
$VAR1 = [
          '7',
          '8',
          '9'
        ];
=cut

print Dumper @data;

=PRINTS
$VAR1 = '7';
$VAR2 = '8';
$VAR3 = '9';
=cut

print Dumper $string;

=PRINTS
$VAR1 = 'this is string';
=cut

print Dumper \$string;

=PRINTS
$VAR1 = \'this is string';
=cut

__END__
I used a feature of Perl called perlpod - the "Plain Old Documentation
+"
commands to interleave multi-line printouts into the code. That is not
what this is normally used for, but you will sometimes see this techni
+que
on PM as a way to make the code and the printout all "one Perl file" t
+hat
can be executed.
[download]

There is more than one module that can dump data, but Data::Dumper is "core" meaning that it is included in all Perl distributions and you can just assume that it is there without having to install anything. Have fun experimenting.