My interpretation is that Dumper is dumping you a
string that was produced from the stringization of a hash
reference. Note the single-quotes surrounding the body of the dumped
output and the embedded newline.
Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Fri 05/07/2021 19:46:25
C:\@Work\Perl\monks
>perl -Mwarnings
use Data::Dumper;
my $hr = { qw(one uno two dos) };
my $request = "$hr\n"; # stringize a hash ref, end in newline
print Dumper $request;
print Dumper %$request;
^Z
$VAR1 = 'HASH(0x333824)
';
(Update: So I'd say that the unkosher '('
comes from the opening paren in
'HTTP::Request=HASH(0x1c23960)'.)
As to the
print Dumper %$request;
$VAR1 = '4/8
';
part, I can't reproduce it, but note that enabling strictures throws an
error for the
%$request expression (do you have
strict enabled?), and that the following stringization
gives the number of hash "bins" used versus those currently
allotted for the hash:
Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Fri 05/07/2021 20:03:42
C:\@Work\Perl\monks
>perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings
use Data::Dumper;
my $hr = { qw(one uno two dos) };
my $bins = '' . %$hr;
print Dumper $bins;
^Z
$VAR1 = '2/8';
(Update: I.e., '2/8' is a feature of the
stringization of hashes and has nothing to do with
Data::Dumper:
Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Fri 05/07/2021 20:15:42
C:\@Work\Perl\monks
>perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings
my %hash = qw(one uno two dos);
print '' . %hash;
^Z
2/8
Note that details of this behavior changed somewhere between
versions 5.8 and 5.30.)
Give a man a fish: <%-{-{-{-<