in reply to Data::Dumper Efficiency Problem

I used to swear by Data::Dumper, but I don't anymore. I'm not sure about the internals, but I have to say that recently I've really come to be frustrated by it. Doing performance analysis under Win32 (Win32::PerfLib, not in CPAN), I end up dumping large hash structures all the time. When I was doing research into the format of these things I tried to get a dump of one base level object (System, for those who care).

It ended up running out of memory, swap...everything. Wouldn't finish running, it was using well over 200M of memory. I have since then written my own (somewhat dumb) replacement, took an hour or two, and suggest either following suit or searching around here for something that has enough functionality for what you need and is simpler than Data::Dumper. If there's interest, I'll post my lil snippet, but it's basically trivial.

Trinary

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Data::Dumper Efficiency Problem
by madhatter (Sexton) on Jan 04, 2001 at 00:19 UTC
    Trinary,
    Please do post! I'm very interested in this.
    Thanks,
    madhatter
[reply]
      Ask, and ye shall recieve: This is just a sub, pretty basic actually and probably broken in a couple ways. takes a ref as argument, and starts-a-printin. Haven't done any performance testing vs. Data::Dumper.

      Begin code

      sub dumpref {
        my $testref = shift;
        my $levels = shift;

        if (ref($testref) eq 'HASH') {
                print "{\n";
                $levels++;
                my $maxlevel = scalar(keys %$testref);
                my $curlevel = 0;
                foreach my $key (keys %$testref) {
                        $curlevel++;
                        print " " x $levels;
                        print $key;
                        print " => ";
                        my $val = $testref->{$key};
                        if (ref($val)) {
                                &dumpref($val,$levels);
                        } else {
                                $val =~ s#\\#\\\\#;
                                $val =~ s#'#\\'#;
                                print "'$val'";
                        }
                        print "," if $curlevel < $maxlevel;
                        print "\n";
                }
                print " " x ($levels - 1) . "}";
        } elsif (ref($testref) eq 'ARRAY') {
                print "[\n";
                $levels++;
                my $maxlevel = scalar(@$testref);
                foreach my $val (@$testref) {
                        $curlevel++;
                        print " " x $levels;
                        if (ref($val)) {
                                &dumpref($val,$levels);
                                print " " x ($levels - 1);
                        } else {
                                $val =~ s#\\#\\\\#;
                                $val =~ s#'#\\'#;
                                print "'$val'";
                        }
                        print "," if $curlevel < $maxlevel;
                        print "\n";
                }
                print " " x ($levels - 1) . "]";
        } else {
                print ref($testref);
                print "\n";
        }
}

      [download]

      End Code

      Use at your own risk, but it handles basic stuff ok, I think. =b

      Trinary

[reply]
[d/l]
        $val =~ s#'#\\'#g <-- (no?)
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom