Finding out what is in an array of Hash (on a server) - arrays

Question

I am using a 3rd party shopping cart solution that runs on a server (SellerDeck). I have some code that runs on the server to format a shopping basket with basic product data (quantity, price, name). I need to find some more data which I think is held in 2 arrays of hashes. I dont know what is contained in these 2 arrays so I would like to convert the array to a string and output via the existing code that puts it in a cookie on the client which I can then view. The 2 arrays are $pCartItem and $pProduct (see code at the bottom for how they are used).
The string $cartStr (bottom of the code) is output onto the client in a cookie by another part of the code.
I would like to covert the 2 arrays into 2 strings which can be concatenated onto $cartStr. I can then read the contents on my local pc (client). My issue is I am very unfamiliar with perl and know how to do the conversion.
I tried adding :
my $MiniCrtS=" ";
my $MiniCartElmt;
foreach $MiniCartElmt (#{$pProduct}) {
$MiniCrtS=$MiniCrtS . $MiniCartElmt;
}
and then changed the $cartStr from:
HTML::Entities::encode(substr($pProduct->{'NAME'},0,$abrv))
to:
HTML::Entities::encode(substr($MiniCrtS,0,$abrv))
but this change makes the code crash when run.
Any ideas on what I am doing wrong or an alternative to find out the data in the arrays?
Many thanks Tony
The relevant code is:
sub miniCart
{
use HTML::Entities ();
my $Self = shift;
my $abrv=12; # number of characters to abbreviate item name
my $defaultCur="£"; # currency symbol to include
my $cartStr="ss=" . $::g_sSearchScript . "cur=" . $defaultCur;
my $pCartItem;
foreach $pCartItem (#{$Self->{_CartList}})
{
my ($Status, $Message, $pProduct) = GetProduct($pCartItem->{'PRODUCT_REFERENCE'}, $pCartItem->{'SID'});
if ($Status == $::FAILURE)
{
return ($Status, $Message, []);
}
elsif ($Status == $::NOTFOUND)
{
next;
}
my #Prices = $Self->GetCartItemPrice($pCartItem);
$cartStr=$cartStr . "&!" . $pCartItem->{'QUANTITY'} . "x" . HTML::Entities::encode($pCartItem->{'PRODUCT_REFERENCE'}) . ">" . HTML::Entities::encode(substr($pProduct->{'NAME'},0,$abrv)) . ">" . $Prices[2]/100;
}
return $cartStr;
}

Answer 1

To get a dump of a data structure, you can use Data::Dumper.
I'd use it as follows:
use Data::Dumper qw( );
sub dumper {
local $Data::Dumper::Indent = 0;
local $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
local $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;
local $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1;
return Data::Dumper::Dumper($_[0]);
}
warn("pProduct: " . dumper($pProduct));
This will log it the string produced to the web server's error log, but you could also return it in a cookie if that's what you really want.