Monks,

If I try to dump a Perl structure from Data::Dumper, I get dummy functions in place of any CODE refs that happen to be in my data structure.

What I'm looking for is something similar to JavaScript's toString() method.

From the documentation of Data::Dumper.pm I got the impression that this is not possible in Perl:

"Data::Dumper" cheats with CODE references. If a code reference is encountered in the structure being processed, an anonymous subroutine that contains the string '"DUMMY"' will be inserted in its place, and a warning will be printed if "Purity" is set. (...) Someday, perl will have a switch to cache-on-demand the string representation of a compiled piece of code, I hope.
A quick demonstration: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $test = {
  test => 1,
  code => sub { print 'Yeah'; },
  aref => [ qw(1 2 3 4 5) ],
};

print Dumper($test);

[download]
Output: 
$VAR1 = {
          'code' => sub { "DUMMY" },
          'aref' => [
                      '1',
                      '2',
                      '3',
                      '4',
                      '5'
                    ],
          'test' => 1
        };

[download]
Is there really no work around or alternative possible?

--
Cheers, Joe

In reply to Coderef to String conversion? by joe++

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