bigtiny: I think the point you are missing is that the output of the  Dumper function is already a string. As such, it can be operated with or operated on (or passed as a parameter to a function) just as any other string can be.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"use Data::Dumper;
 my @ra = (1, 2, { 3 => 'three' } );
 my $du = Dumper \@ra;
 print qq{**$du**};
"
**$VAR1 = [
          1,
          2,
          {
            '3' => 'three'
          }
        ];
**
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Update: Changed wording, example code slightly to better make the point.

You mean something like:

use Data::Dumper;
use Fatal qw(open close);
open my $log, '>', $path_to_log;

my_print_routine( $log, Dumper( \%some_var ) );
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Update ... I imagine your subroutine just uses print, with no room for specifying a filehandle. Something like:

You could select your filehandle to make it the default output, but that doesn't work if you also print to STDOUT. You could modify the print routine to check whether the first arg is a filehandle, and select it there, saving the previous value to select it back at the routine exit.

P.S. Bareword fielhandles and two-argument open are so Perl4 ... check out 'perldoc -f open' for the modern way.

Update 2 ... I dunno about others, I would check the first arg by seeing if : 'GLOB' eq ref $_[0]. if you had a valid reason for passing around GLOBs, that would fail.

Perhaps I misunderstand you:

perl -le 'use Data::Dumper; open(my $fh, ">x.txt") or die "open $!"; p
+rint $fh Dumper([1,2,3]);'
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