In addition to the direction given by the mighty crazy one, I would also point you towards serialisation methods which subsequently allow you to compare complex data structures. The most notable of serialisation modules for Perl would be Data::Dumper and Storable - The latter of which can be used to compare data with greater speed than Data::Dumper with its methods more closely tied to the C-representation of these data objects.

An example piece of comparison code using Storable might look like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Storable qw/freeze/;
use strict;

$Storable::canonical = 1;

my @x = ( '1', '2', '3', '4', '5' );
my @y = ( '1', '2', '3', '4', '5' );
my @z = ( '6', '7', '8', '9', '0' );

print "x = y\n" if (freeze(\@x) eq freeze(\@y));    #   True
print "x = z\n" if (freeze(\@x) eq freeze(\@z));    #   False
print "x != z\n" if (freeze(\@x) ne freeze(\@z));   #   True
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Others familiar with this module will recognise the $Storable::canonical = 1 assignment as unnecessary in this example where arrays are being serialised - This assignment will allow Storable to store hashes with their elements sorted by their key, thereby allowing later comparison of the frozen serial structures.

 

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