NAME

  BFD - Impromptu dumping of data structures for debugging purposes

SYNOPSIS

   my $scary_structure1 = foo();
   my $scary_structure2 = bar();
   use BFD; d $scary_structure1, " hmmm ", $scary_structure2, ...;
   ....

DESCRIPTION

Allows for impromptu dumping of output to STDERR. Useful when you want to take a peek at a nest Perl data structure by emitting (relatively) nicely formatted output with filename and line number prefixed to each line.

Basically,

    use BFD;d $foo;

is shorthand for

    use Data::Dumper;
    local $Data::Dumper::Indent    = 1;
    local $Data::Dumper::Quotekeys = 0;
    local $Data::Dumper::Terse     = 1;
    local $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys  = 1;
    my $msg = Dumper( $foo );
    $msg =~ s/^/$where: /mg;
    warn $msg;

I use this incantation soooo often that a TLA version is warranted. YMMV.

LIMITATIONS

Uses Data::Dumper, which has varying degrees of stability and usefulness on different versions of perl.

AUTHOR

Barrie Slaymaker <barries@slaysys.com>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2003, Barrie Slaymaker. All Rights Reserved.

LICENSE

You may use this software under the terms of the GNU Public License, the Artistic License, the BSD license, or the MIT license.

Good luck and God Speed.