Hi bash,

Only for debugging So data should be human readable.

I think that's a tricky situation, because if you're debugging, it may be important to be able to see the differences between, for example, various Unicode whitespace characters. I suspect you only want to prevent certain characters from being escaped? That means you'd have to pick and choose.

Personally I don't find Data::Printer's dependency tree to be too bad. But just in case you're looking for something else, it might be possible to roll your own with Data::Dump::Filtered:

use warnings;
use strict;
use open qw/:std :utf8/;

my $str = "\$\x{2142}\x{1D1A}\x{018E}\x{0500}\x{2003}\"";

use Data::Dump 'pp';
use Data::Dump::Filtered qw/add_dump_filter/;

add_dump_filter( sub {
        my ($ctx, $objref) = @_;
        if ($ctx->is_scalar) {
            #TODO: this doesn't escape, not really that great!
            return { dump => "\"$$objref\"" };
        }
        return; # normal dumping
    } );

print '$str=',pp($str),";\n";
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Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D