Section 6.3.  YAML

6.3. YAML

Data::Dumper is not the only game on the island, though. Brian Ingerson came up with Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) to provide a more readable (and more compact) dump. It works in the same way as Data::Dumper. We'll see more about YAML when we talk about modules later, so we won't say much about it here.

From the earlier example, we plug in YAML where we had Data::Dumper, and use Dump( ) where we had Dumper( ).

use YAML;

my %total_bytes;

while (<>) {
        my ($source, $destination, $bytes) = split;
        $total_bytes{$source}{$destination} += $bytes;
        }

print Dump(\%total_bytes);

When you use the same data from the earlier example, you get this output:

--- #YAML:1.0
ginger.girl.hut:
  maryann.girl.hut: 199
  professor.hut: 1218
professor.hut:
  gilligan.crew.hut: 1250
  lovey.howell.hut: 1360
thurston.howell.hut:
  lovey.howell.hut: 1250

That's a lot easier to read because it takes up less space on the screen, which can be really handy when you have deeply nested data structures.