Does Perl have something similar to print_r? The question has been asked before by people at all levels of expertise with Perl and PHP. The answer has often been Data::Dumper, but that is both more powerful and more complex than needed. This code will produce basically the same results as the popular PHP print_r without any settings or objects to worry about...
use strict;
use warnings;

my @array1 = qw( four five six );
my @array = qw( one two three );
push( @array, \@array1 );

my $string = "four";
my %hash   = (
    'first' => 'one',
    'second' => 'two',
    'third'  => 'three',
    'fourth' => \@array,
);

#print_r( @array );

print_r( \%hash );

sub print_r {
    package print_r;
    our $level;
    our @level_index;
    if ( ! defined $level ) { $level = 0 };
    if ( ! defined @level_index ) { $level_index[$level] = 0 };

    for ( @_ ) {
        my $element = $_;
        my $index   = $level_index[$level];

        print "\t" x $level . "[$index] => ";

        if ( ref($element) eq 'ARRAY' ) {
            my $array = $_;

            $level_index[++$level] = 0;

            print "(Array)\n";

            for ( @$array ) {
                main::print_r( $_ );
            }
            --$level if ( $level > 0 );
        } elsif ( ref($element) eq 'HASH' ) {
            my $hash = $_;

            print "(Hash)\n";

            ++$level;

            for ( keys %$hash ) {
                $level_index[$level] = $_;
                main::print_r( $$hash{$_} );
            }
        } else {
            print "$element\n";
        }

        $level_index[$level]++;
    }
} # End print_r

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In reply to print_r by GhodMode

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