It is therefore highly probable as everyone else has surmised that you have accidentally stringified $request at some point in the code you have not shown.

...

I was trying to print with:

print Dumper %$request . "\n";
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Removing the concatenated return character gives...

...

To continue to use \n, use a list with print ...

# Need to use "Dumper()" else "\n" will be swallowed by "Dumper ... ;"
+ 
print Dumper( ... ), qq[\n];
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