At the risk of being pedantic, I thought I'd flesh out some information here.

As guha pointed out, using &diag instead of print is the way to go. &diag prints its messages in such a way so as to play nicely with Test::Harness. It's always possible that simply printing data could result in something that confuses Test::Harness and thus causes unpredictable results which could be hard to diagnose.

Also, it looks like you're using the venerable Test module instead of Test::More. In the former, your code makes perfect sense. In the latter you'll find that &ok does a simple boolean check, but &is makes the comparison, allows a test name to be assigned and gives very useful diagnostic info.

$ perl -MTest::More=tests,1 -e 'is(23,42,"Discordia should have the an
+swer")'
1..1
not ok 1 - Discordia should have the answer
#     Failed test (-e at line 1)
#          got: '23'
#     expected: '42'
# Looks like you failed 1 tests of 1.

[download]

And if you like the new Data::Dumper::Simple, you may wish to note that unlike Data::Dumper, the parentheses are required. That's lamentable, but it made it much easier to implement.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

In reply to Re: Using Data::Dumper in Test-Driven Development by Ovid
in thread Using Data::Dumper in Test-Driven Development by dws

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