You can manipulate the formatting of Data::Dumper's output. It may not be exactly the format you're wanting though, but it may be closer than the default is. The POD for that module explains how to:

• Control the style of indentation.
• Specify a string to be prefixed to every line of output.
• Change the prefix of variable names in output.
• Adjust output to a more "terse" format (maybe close to what you want).

Update: Here is an example of how close you can get with Data::Dumper:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = qw/this 1 that 2 those 3 them 4/;

$Data::Dumper::Terse++;
$Data::Dumper::Quotekeys = 0;
$Data::Dumper::Indent = 1;

print Dumper \%hash;

__OUTPUT__
{
  those => '3',
  them => '4',
  that => '2',
  this => '1'
}
[download]

Without the formatting overrides, here is what you would have gotten:

$VAR1 = {
          'those' => '3',
          'them' => '4',
          'that' => '2',
          'this' => '1'
        };
[download]

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.