Perl and Word have been playing well together for me for a while now on a W2K/ActiveState 5.8.4 platform. A new wrinkle has come up and I'm trying to verify what is in the Word objects I am creating.

I'd expect to be able to examine those objects with Dumper, but when I do so, I seem to get stuck in a loop and the Windows Task Manager shows the VM Size of my perl.exe pgm getting larger and larger at which point I kill the perl.exe process.

The following sample code extracts the essence of my Dumper test. My question is, "Aren't I able to look at these objects with Dumper?" (The if 0 and if 1 thingies give me easy-to-find debugging hooks to play with.)

(For what it's worth, the original problem I'm investigating is that something new/weird is happening in the Save process. And I don't think I did anything and I'm wondering if something has changed on the OLE side. I can see the Word document being created but when the document is saved to disk, it appears empty. But that's another story....)

use strict;
use Win32::OLE qw(in with);
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Word';
use Data::Dumper;

# Update:  The following line, per advice below, solves my problem:
# $Data::Dumper::Maxdepth=2;



    # check if Word exists
    my $x = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Word.Application');
    die "Word not Installed" if $@;

warn "1 OK to here.\n";

    # start Word program, die if unable to
    unless (defined $x) {
      unless (
        $x = Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application', sub { $_[0]->Quit; })
              ) {
                    die "Cannot start Word.\n";
      }
    }

warn "2 OK to here.\n";

do_dumper( 'wobjX:', $x )
if 1;

warn "3 OK to here.\n";

    my $template_file = 'e:\\aa\\myfile.dot';
    my $d;
    unless (
        $d = $x->Documents->Add( $template_file )
                ) {
                        die "Cannot open file '$template_file': $!\n";
    }

do_dumper( 'wobjD:', $d )
if 0;

    undef $x;
    undef $d;

warn "4 OK to here.\n";



sub do_dumper {
    my ( $label, $variable ) = @_;
    my $msg = Dumper( $variable );

    open P2W, ">> p2w_out.txt";
    print P2W "$label:\n$msg\n";
    #warn "$label:\n$msg\n";
    close P2W;
}
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Update: Made some minor revisions to sample code to fix cosmetic problems with quoting. Thanks for the advice--I'm getting stuff I can read now. :-)