If you are storing records like this, you might want to consider Data::Dumper or YAML, that way you can dodge the debugging question entirely and get back to doing fun stuff :)

Honestly, I take short cuts too often, but when they work cleanly...hey...I use them. I find Data::Dumper is fairly more reliable than YAML, easier to remember for Perl hackers, and less thrown into indent-level chaos when hacked by hand. But if you want the extra feature of printable/readable records by non-Perl types, YAML is more suitable.