Actually I should have said that when I have time ill be looking at your link about structure shy traversal. It sounds interesting.

Sorry I couldnt be more helpful with the ref to string bit. As I believe I've said before DD doesnt handle refs to scalars as well as it should. Fine for visual inspection, terrible for reuse.

Actually iirc this one of the few things that Data::Dump does better than Data::Dumper (watch out though you can get Data::Dump to hang on certain types of circular data structure.)

Also the more you prod me the faster ill get a new version of BFDump out the door. I appreciate the heads up and reminders. :-)