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

The answer depends on what is in your hash. If you have a simple hash a simple

print map { "$_ $h{$_}\n" } keys %h;

or

print "$_ $h{$_}\n" for keys %h;

will do, but if you have a hash that is populated with references you will something that can walk those references and produce a sensible output. This walking of the references is normally called serialization. There are many modules that implement different styles, some of the more popular ones are:

• Data::Dumper
• Data::Dump::Streamer
• YAML::XS
• JSON::XS
• XML::Dumper

Due to the fact that Data::Dumper is part of the core Perl library, it is probably the most popular; however, some of the other modules have very good things to offer.