NAME

Data::Dumper::UnDumper - load Dumper output including $VAR1 refs

SYNOPSIS

Load in a Data::Dumper output via eval, including supporting $VAR1 style references etc as emitted if you don't set the Purity option:

    use Data::Dumper::UnDumper;
    
    my $complex_ref = { ... };
    my $dumped = Data::Dumper::Dumper($complex_ref);

    my $undumped = Data::Dumper::UnDumper::undumper($dumped);

DESCRIPTION

Firstly, a safety warning: loading Data::Dumper output, which is designed to be evaled, is a big safety risk if the data comes from an untrusted source. It's evaled as Perl code, so it can do anything you could write a Perl program to. Future versions of this module may use Safe to mitigate that risk somewhat, but it's still there - to support object references, bless would have to be allowed.

So, given the choice, what should you use instead? Any of the many serialisation options that don't serialise as code - for e.g. JSON, YAML, etc.

I wrote this module, though, because I didn't have a choice - I was receiving Data::Dumper output which had been written to a log in the past by some code, without using the <$Data::Dumper::PURITY> setting, so it included $VAR1 references, including re-used JSON::PP objects.

This has been lightly tested with the default output from Data::Dumper::Dump(). It's quite likely that you could have Data::Dumper generate output this will not handle by setting some of the dumping options.

SUBROUTINES

undumper

Given the output of Data::Dumper's Dumper / Dump method, "undump" it, deserialising it back in to a Perl scalar/object, handling `$VAR1` references.

SEE ALSO

Data::Undump

Doesn't support cyclical references, blessed objects.

Data::Undump::PPI

Safer as it uses PPI not eval, but doesn't support blessed objects or refs.

plain old eval

For simple Data::Dumper output you can of course just eval it, but that falls down when the output includes references to other parts of the object e.g. 'foo' => $VAR1->{'bar'}

AUTHOR

David Precious (BIGPRESH), <davidp@preshweb.co.uk>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2023-2024 by David Precious

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS