Thanks for the quick reply , I just had a look at Data::Dumper::Streamer. The only thing is, I need to use Data::Dumper ( or something like it) in a core part of a large system which is used VERY often, so I liked the fact that the xs version of dumper was fast (well faster than the perl version ). I haven't done any benchmarking on Data::Dumper::Streamer but the documentation I think said that it sacrificed speed for memory whereas I am happy to go the other way :-). But still might be worth a try as it seems to be dealing with the high bit characters well. Nabeel