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in reply to Re: Basic debugging checklist
in thread Basic debugging checklist

I recently got bitten by doing this. The debugging messages were going to the web page. The code was misbehaving, but no debugging messages appeared. View Source explained why - because I had used < and >, they were being interpreted as HTML tags that made no sense & were ignored. Since then, I've been using square brackets.

Regards,

John Davies

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Re^3: Basic debugging checklist
by LanX (Saint) on Mar 01, 2020 at 23:57 UTC
    yeah that's why CGI::Carp translates -> to and so on, which makes some dumps hard to read.

    My preference to <...> over [...] stems from the fact that square brackets are easily confused as array syntax by the eye.

    I'd suggest to either double or invert the angle brackets, I doubt that <<...>> or >...< are easily confused as HTML tags.

    update

    I was wrong with the simple doubling, this <<br>> would be a a break surrounded by angles.

    Though this might help ->...<-

    I'm open for other ASCII suggestions, i.e. avoiding unicode.

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
    Wikisyntax for the Monastery

      Mostly I use the apostrophe (ASCII 39 or x27). This helps as I'm used to seeing it delimiting strings so a "missing" terminator at a line end or one with preceding space appears obvious. In those rare occurrences where this is less effective because of the prevalence of apostrophes in the data corpus I sometimes use the tilde instead (ASCII 126 or x7E). HTH.