If you don't like that, consider using YAML.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Im afraid to say that while I somewhat agree with you first statement, the second statement is bad advice. As far as broken dumpers go YAML is one of the worst. Data::Dumper is far more accurate in my testing. One of these days I will get around to publishing my Dumper comparison suite to back these words up. Suffice it to say that YAML will get your Data::Dumper bugreport wrong as well as number of much more simple examples. Some of these weaknesses are even listed in the YAML documentation.

Unfortunately but IMO the current version of YAML is not suitable for much more than config files.

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....

Im afraid you seem to have made an invalid assumption here:

print Dumper($hash); #which prints (\\d+), this really confused me

Dumper doesnt print (\\d+) it prints '(\\d+)' which is perfectly correct. Dumpers output (with any settings but Terse) is as merlyn pointed out meant to be evalled. This means that it emits valid perl statements to reconstruct the original data. So when it outputs a single quoted string it of course emits \\ instead of \ just as you used \\ inside of the doublequoted string when you assigned the value in the first place.

Short of emitting HERE docs as part of its output (which would be a PIA to read IMO) there is no way for it to specify a \ inside of a quoted construct except as \\. (Well, thats not strictly true. Dumper could be smarter about knowing which \ sequnces actually need to be doubled, but IMO the output would look even stranger, with some \ doubled and some not.)

The moral of the story is that Dumper does indeed get stuff wrong, but those things are rare indeed, and most of them are well known to the author and maintainers and to most of the more experienced members of the Perl community. It is unlikely that you will encounter a Dumper bug that isnt on this list. And incidentlly for the few things that do remain, they havent been fixed becuase currently it doesnt look like they are worth being fixed.

#are these the same or different?
my ($x,$y);
$x=\$y;
$y=\$x;
print Dumper([$x,$y]);
my $ar=[];
$ar->[0]=\$ar->[1];
$ar->[1]=\$ar->[0];
print Dumper($ar);
[download]

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....

package My::Dumper;

use base 'Data::Dumper';

sub Dumper
{
     my $result = Data::Dumper::Dumper(@_);
     $result =~ s/\\\\/\\/g;
}
[download]