Re^3: Reference madness

[Athanasius]

Hello sdani,

I would say it's a quite unexpected behaviour..., because when I dump \@say, it prints out the expected results...

That’s because Data::Dumper (like Data::Dump) applies a dereferencing operation to its argument if that argument is a reference. This is usually what you want; but to avoid it, just print the variable instead:

23:27 >perl -MData::Dumper -wE "my @a = qw( a e i o u ); print Dumper(
+\@a); print \@a;"
$VAR1 = [
          'a',
          'e',
          'i',
          'o',
          'u'
        ];
ARRAY(0x4d2ec8)
23:27 >

Note the square brackets in the output from Data::Dumper: they denote an anonymous array reference. See perlreftut.

Hope that helps,