How can I print the contents of a hash in Perl?

Question

I keep printing my hash as # of buckets / # allocated. How do I print the contents of my hash?

Without using a while loop would be most preferable (for

Answer 1

For debugging purposes I will often use YAML.

use strict;
use warnings;

use YAML;

my %variable = ('abc' => 123, 'def' => [4,5,6]);

print "# %variable\n", Dump \%variable;

Results in:

# %variable
---
abc: 123
def:
  - 4
  - 5
  - 6

---

Other times I will use Data::Dump. You don't need to set as many variables to get it to output it in a nice format than you do for Data::Dumper.

use Data::Dump = 'dump';

print dump(\%variable), "\n";

{ abc => 123, def => [4, 5, 6] }

---

More recently I have been using Data::Printer for debugging.

use Data::Printer;
p %variable;

{
    abc   123,
    def   [
        [0] 4,
        [1] 5,
        [2] 6
    ]
}

( Result can be much more colorful on a terminal )

Unlike the other examples I have shown here, this one is designed explicitly to be for display purposes only. Which shows up more easily if you dump out the structure of a tied variable or that of an object.

use strict;
use warnings;

use MTie::Hash;
use Data::Printer;

my $h = tie my %h, "Tie::StdHash";
@h{'a'..'d'}='A'..'D';
p %h;
print "\n";
p $h;

{
    a   "A",
    b   "B",
    c   "C",
    d   "D"
} (tied to Tie::StdHash)

Tie::StdHash  {
    public methods (9) : CLEAR, DELETE, EXISTS, FETCH, FIRSTKEY, NEXTKEY, SCALAR, STORE, TIEHASH
    private methods (0)
    internals: {
        a   "A",
        b   "B",
        c   "C",
        d   "D"
    }
}