Re^2: In need of a Dumper that has no pretentions to being anything else.

[fergal]

My patch doesn't remove circular ref protection. Circular ref protection comes from keeping a track of all the refs we've seen so far and I've not touched that.

DD also keeps track of all scalars that it sees so that when you run this

use Data::Dumper;
my %s=('key',1);
my $s=\$s{'key'};
print Dumper([\%s, $s])

you get

$VAR1 = [
          {
            'key' => 1
          },
          \$VAR1->[0]{'key'}
        ];

that is, it was able to spot that the 1 in %s{key} is actually the same 1 that's in $s.

My patch removes this ability when $Deepcopy = 0. This is consistent with the rest of the deepcopy behaviour and means that now that the only thing that can cause a backreference to some other part of the structure is circularity.

[demerphq]

Note that DD only gets it right with print Dumper([\%s, $s]) but not with print Dumper([$s, \%s])

For that you need a better dumper. I wonder if its arguable that the tracking you are talking about disabling is actually not required for Purity=0 dumps.

[fergal]

Depends on what you mean by "right". I get

$VAR1 = [
          \1,
          {
            'key' => ${$VAR1->[0]}
          }
        ];

which can't be evaluated correctly by Perl's eval but it does contain all the necessary information. A human can see what's going on and it's probably possible to write something that would reconstruct the correct sturucture but it would involve some sort of constraint solver.

Purity just controls whether it should be compatible with eval(). Even with Purity=0, this information should be preserved otherwise certain structures would have identical output even though they're not identical.

Deepcopy controls whether we care about cross references so it definitely should be dropped when you have Deepcopy=1.

[demerphq]

Depends on what you mean by "right".

Something that is reasonably close to valid perl that will recreate the original data. In this case the code is just plain wrong, with or without Purity mode.

this information should be preserved otherwise certain structures would have identical output even though they're not identical.

You mean like Data::Dumper does below? (And Data::Dump::Streamer does not?)

Read more... (2 kB)

probably possible to write something that would reconstruct the correct sturucture but it would involve some sort of constraint solver

See Data::Dump::Streamer for a dumper that handles these things properly. DD does a single pass over its dataset, and a depth first one at that, this almost guarantees that it will get things like this wrong. These are very old bugs, first raised by merlyn years ago (see a bug report that involves the dog pound) that still havent been fixed, and frankly probably will never be fixed.

[halley]

Fair enough-- the patch doesn't give a lot of context and I didn't look at the whole. It's squirrelly code. I was just putting in a note that any quick change could break a lot of people.