Another way to compare to arbitrarily complex data structures is to use canonical serialization. Storable is one module that provides this capability.

For example:

use Storable;

sub deeply_equal {
  my ( $a_ref, $b_ref ) = @_;
  
  local $Storable::canonical = 1;
  return Storable::freeze( $a_ref ) eq Storable::freeze( $b_ref );
}
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