You also might want to try my Data::Dumper::Simple. I would only advise it for debugging (not production), but it has the nice effect of printing the variable name(s).

While I'm not its author, I also recommend Data::Dumper::Simple. It's a very nice tool that saves you the mental hassle of wondering what the heck $VAR1 really was. It's also a drop-in replacement for Data::Dumper, meaning that you can just change use Data::Dumper to use Data::Dumper::Simple.

Thanks for the tool Ovid. :)

If you open up the source code, you see two places that determines this:

$Indent = 2 unless defined $Indent;
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And

  if ($Indent > 0) {
    $s->{xpad} = "  ";
    $s->{sep} = "\n";
  }
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$s->{sep} is where that line break comes from. If you change $s->{sep} to "". You got this:

$VAR1 = [          'a',          'b',          'c'        ];
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The line break is gone, but you got whole bunch of blanks. Those blanks are caused by the Indent. So change Indent to 0. Now you get:

$VAR1 = ['a','b','c'];
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That's what you asked for. But with setting Indent to 0, is it still needed to set $s->{"sep"} to ""? No, as that block will only be executed if Indent is greater than 0, which is no longer true. So the only thing you need to do is to set Indent to 0.

Do you need to change the source code? No, You can set Indent from your program as Ovid has showed you.

use Data::Dumper;

use strict;
use warnings;
$Data::Dumper::Indent = 0;
my $a = ["a", "b", "c"];

print Dumper($a);
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Depends what you want to do. And ill just chime in with yet another dumper to use... :-)

D:\>perl -MData::Dumper -e "@arr = qw (a b c); print Data::Dumper->new
+([\@arr])->Indent(0)->Dump"
$VAR1 = ['a','b','c'];

D:\>perl -MData::Dump::Streamer -e "@arr = qw (a b c); Dump(\@arr)->In
+dent(0)->Out()"
$ARRAY1 = [ 'a', 'b', 'c' ];

D:\>perl -MData::Dump::Streamer -e "@arr = (qw (a b),(qw(c)) x 4); Dum
+p(\@arr)->Names('*arr')->Indent(0)->Out()"
@arr = ( 'a', 'b', ( 'c' ) x 4 );
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And yet another.

D:\>perl -MData::Dump=dump -e "@arr = (qw (a b),(qw(c)) x 4); print du
+mp(\@arr)"
["a", "b", "c", "c", "c", "c"]
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Since the output of Data::Dumper is valid perl code, what about passing the output of Data::Dumper through Perl::Tidy?

# Pretty() filters Data::Dumper output to join up short related lines.
# This makes it a lot easier to read a typical hash structure.
# Set $Data::Dumper::Fill like you would set $Text::Wrap::columns.
#
sub Pretty
{
    my @src = split(/\n/, join('', @_));
    my @dst = ();
    my $f = $Data::Dumper::Fill || 72;
    my $i = 0;
    while ($i <= $#src)
    {
        my $l = $src[$i];
        if (not $l =~ /[\[\{\(]\s*$/)
        { push(@dst, $l); $i++; next; }
        my ($p) = ($l =~ /^(\s+)/);
        my $j = $i+1;
        while ($j <= $#src)
        {
            my $n = $src[$j];
            my ($q) = ($n =~ /^(\s+)/);
            $n =~ s/^\s+/ /;
            if (length($l) + length($n) >= $f)
            { $l = $src[$i]; last; }
            $l .= $n;
            if ($q and $p and $q eq $p) { $i = $j; last; }
            $j++;
        }
        push(@dst, $l);
        $i++;
    }

    return join("\n", @dst) . "\n";
}
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Not exactly what you asked for, but I was reminded of two modules I'd looked at recently that allow one to draw pictures of their data structures (includes links to graphical output).

GraphViz::Data::Structure and GraphViz::Data::Grapher both can output to various formats like .JPG and .PNG, and GraphViz::Data::Structure lets you set horizontal or vertical orientation. Depending on your needs, you might want to give them a try.

HTH,

When I think of dumping something, my image is not that I put it in a nice-looking arranged way. Try looking for a module that doesn't have the word dump in its name.