NAME

String::Dump - Dump strings of characters (or bytes) for printing and debugging

VERSION

This document describes String::Dump version 0.09.

SYNOPSIS

    use String::Dump qw( dump_hex dump_bin );

    say 'hex: ', dump_hex($string);
    say 'bin: ', dump_bin($string);

DESCRIPTION

When debugging or examining strings containing non-ASCII or non-printing characters, String::Dump is your friend. It provides simple functions to return a dump of the code points for Unicode strings or the bytes for byte strings in several different formats, such as hex, binary, Unicode names, and more.

For using this module from the command line, see the bundled dumpstr script. For tips on debugging Unicode or byte strings with this module, see the document String::Dump::Debugging.

FUNCTIONS

These functions all accept a single argument: the string to dump, which may either be a Unicode string or a byte string. All functions are exported by default unless specific ones are requested. The ":all" tag may be used to explicitly export all functions.

dump_hex($string)

Hexadecimal (base 16) mode.

    use utf8;
    # string of 6 characters
    say dump_hex('Xis! X');  # 11C 69 73 21 20 263A

    no utf8;
    # series of 9 bytes
    say dump_hex('Xis! X');  # C4 9C 69 73 21 20 E2 98 BA

For a lowercase hex dump, simply pass the response to "lc".

    say lc dump_hex('Xis! X');  # 11c 69 73 21 20 263a

dump_dec($string)

Decimal (base 10) mode. This is mainly useful when referencing 8-bit code pages like ISO-8859-1 or 7-bit ones like ASCII variants.

    use utf8;
    say dump_dec('Xis! X');  # 284 105 115 33 32 9786

    no utf8;
    say dump_dec('Xis! X');  # 196 156 105 115 33 32 226 152 186

dump_oct($string)

Octal (base 8) mode. This is mainly useful when referencing 7-bit code pages like ASCII variants.

    use utf8;
    say dump_oct('Xis! X');  # 434 151 163 41 40 23072

    no utf8;
    say dump_oct('Xis! X');  # 304 234 151 163 41 40 342 230 272

dump_bin($string)

Binary (base 2) mode.

    use utf8;
    say dump_bin('Xis! X');
    # 100011100 1101001 1110011 100001 100000 10011000111010

    no utf8;
    say dump_bin('Xis! X');
    # 11000100 10011100 1101001 1110011 100001 100000 11100010 10011000 10111010

dump_names($string)

Unicode character name mode. Unlike the various numeral modes above, this mode uses X, X <comma, space> for the delimiter and it only makes sense for Unicode strings, not byte strings.

    use utf8;
    say dump_names('Xis! X');
    # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX, LATIN SMALL LETTER I,
    # LATIN SMALL LETTER S, EXCLAMATION MARK, SPACE, WHITE SMILING FACE

The output in the example above has been manually split into multiple lines for the layout of this document.

dump_codes($string)

Unicode code point mode. This is similar to "dump_hex" except it follows the standard Unicode code point notation. The hex value is 4 to 6 digits, padded with X0X <digit zero> when less than 4, and prefixed with XU+X <latin capital letter u, plus sign>. As with "dump_names", this function only makes sense for Unicode strings, not byte strings.

    use utf8;
    say dump_codes('Xis! X');  # U+011C U+0069 U+0073 U+0021 U+0020 U+263A

AUTHOR

Nick Patch <patch@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

X 2011X2013 Nick Patch

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