On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 12:45:05AM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> As Texinfo tree elements are now blessed into the Texinfo::TreeElement
> class, this class is output by Data::Dumper when used by
> Texinfo::Common::debug_print_tree. I use this fairly often when developing
> and/or debugging. Sample output:
>
> The "bless" function calls with the "Texinfo::TreeElement" arguments
> are new. I couldn't find a way to eliminate the usages of "bless"
> by Data::Dumper.
There is the $Data::Dumper::Toaster function in Data::Dumper that could
be used to do something for each blessed object, maybe copy it without
blessing?
> The only way I can think of is to post-process the
> output with regular expressions.
Another possibility could be to have a global variable/function to turn
on/off blessing of elements (with an XS override such that the same is
done for elements created from C) that would need to be called if
TreeElement are used, which is likely to be never... I can do that if
this is considered to be a good idea. If the elements are not blessed,
the Texinfo::TreeElement::new function would be a noop.
> Maybe this is not a big problem, as I can use
> Texinfo::ManipulateTree::tree_print_details instead (this is the function
> used by the test suite, which uses a different, more concise format,
> albeit one I'm less familiar with):
I personnally prefer this format by far, and only use it, and I found
the Data::Dumper output to be unreadable for debugging anything a bit
complex even before having bless. Another advantage (and the original
reason to do it) is that it can be used to debug C code too, and both
output should be similar (not necessarily exactly the same, maybe, when
the types in C are more precise than in Perl, I haven't checked), which
can be very handy when one or the other gives a better/good result.
> *@node C1 {@asis{} 2}
> |INFO
> |spaces_before_argument:
> |{spaces_before_argument: }
> |EXTRA
> |is_target:{1}
> |node_number:{10}
> |normalized:{-2}
> *arguments_line C1
> *line_arg C2
> |INFO
> |spaces_after_argument:
> |{spaces_after_argument:\n}
> *@asis C1
> *brace_container
> { 2}
>
>
> Incidentally, it is a lot of typing to use Texinfo::Common::debug_print_tree
> or Texinfo::ManipulateTree::tree_print_details when you are trying to debug
> the program. I remember that many years ago, print_tree was exported by
> default by Texinfo::Common. I found the following ChangeLog entry from
> 2022 (I thought it was older):
>
> 2022-09-14 Patrice Dumas <pertu...@free.fr>
>
> * tp/Texinfo/Common.pm: more consistent export ok. Do not
> export print_tree. Rename print_tree() as debug_print_tree().
> Rename add_preamble_before_content as _add_preamble_before_content.
> Remove _collect_references, unused and doing something strange.
>
> Although it may make sense from the perspective of abstraction and
> encapsulation, it doesn't make sense from the sense of making it easy
> to develop the program, in my opinion. So I think we should consider
> exporting a few basic functions by default, so we can again simply write
> "warn print_tree($element);" rather than
> "warn Texinfo::ManipulateTree::tree_print_details($element);".
Do it, no problem, but please add a comment explaining why.
--
Pat
