Mathieu Bouchard <matju / sympatico.ca> wrote: >On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Ben Tilly wrote: > > To see what I mean, in Perl write a bit of code that > > looks like this: > > use Data::Dumper; > > $Data::Dumper::Indent = 1; > > # Build up some complex data structure here... > > $data = [qw(an anonymous array for starters)]; > > print Dumper $data; > > Play around with the data structure a little and think > > about how it looks. You will probably be able to figure > > out how to write your objects prettily to this data > > structure about as easily as you can write to any > > flatfile scheme you come up with, but with this one > > parsing is trivial. > >Do you wish to have an equivalent to Data::Dumper in Ruby? I would find that very nice if it was able to handle recursive data structures. One of the key things that I use Data::Dumper for is to debug the situation when two places in the same data structure are references to the same thing. The debugging output in Ruby does not currently do this... If it doesn't then for the most part, the built-in functionality with "p" is good enough for me. >I began writing one some time ago. Cheers, Ben _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com