Handling complex hashes in perl

Question

I have simple perl script as below:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my %x;

$x{"a"}="b";
$x{"b"}={'c'=>3,'d'=>4};
$x{"c"}={'e'=>{'f'=>5,'g'=>6},'h'=>{'i'=>7,'j'=>8}};

print Dumper(%x);

This is outputting me as below:

> ./temp.pl
$VAR1 = 'c';
$VAR2 = {
          'e' => {
                   'g' => 6,
                   'f' => 5
                 },
          'h' => {
                   'j' => 8,
                   'i' => 7
                 }
        };
$VAR3 = 'a';
$VAR4 = 'b';
$VAR5 = 'b';
$VAR6 = {
          'c' => 3,
          'd' => 4
        };
,

But my desired ouput is something different.so i tried the below code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my %x;

$x{"a"}="b";
$x{"b"}={'c'=>3,'d'=>4};
$x{"c"}={'e'=>{'f'=>5,'g'=>6},'h'=>{'i'=>7,'j'=>8}};

foreach (keys %x )
{
        if(ref($x{$_}) eq "HASH")
        {
        print Dumper(\%{$x{$_}}).",";
        }
        else
        {
        print $x{$_}.",\n"
        }
}

But this gives me an output as below:

> ./temp.pl
$VAR1 = {
          'e' => {
                   'g' => 6,
                   'f' => 5
                 },
          'h' => {
                   'j' => 8,
                   'i' => 7
                 }
        };
,b,
$VAR1 = {
          'c' => 3,
          'd' => 4
        };

but what i need is as below.i donot need VAR1 etc and also => in the output.I just need the keys and values with a space in between them

c  {
          'e'  {
                   'g'  6,
                   'f'  5
                 },
          'h'  {
                   'j'  8,
                   'i'  7
                 }
        },
a b,
b  {
          'c'  3,
          'd'  4
        }

All perl experts out there ,could anybody give me the right direction to print the output as i need it!

i got what i needed from perleone's suggestion. but i also tried the below staement:

my %y={"one"=>404,"two"=>\%x};

now if i do

print Dumper(\%y);

it gives me an output of :

> ./temp.pl
{
          'HASH(0x807f08c)' undef
        }

where did i go wrong here?

Answer 1

Have a look at the documentation. Use these settings:

$Data::Dumper::Pair     = ' ';
$Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
$Data::Dumper::Terse    = 1;

...

print Dumper( \%x );