in reply to re-opening DATA, printing any character

<nl>
  • seek(DATA,0,0). Not a re-open, just roll back to the begining. Hmmm... actually, that puts you at the top of the script. You should save the starting point first: 
        $startOfData= tell DATA;
    while( <DATA> ) {
        ProcessData( $_ );
    }
    seek( DATA, $startOfData, 0 ) or die "Can't seek: $!";
    while( <DATA> ) {
        ReprocessedCheese( $_ );
    }

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  • Lots of modules for this. dumpvar.pl, DumpVar, Data::Dumper, etc. But you can roll your own pretty quick and not feel bad about using one of these modules that knows about so much more than dumping strings: 
        ( $text= $binary ) =~ s#([^ -~])#
        sprintf "\\x%02.2x",unpack("C",$1) #ge;
    print "$text\n";

    [download]
    There are lots of variations here. But my favorite way is just to use the x command in the Perl debugger. </nl>

    • In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom