Is there a Python equivalent to Perl's Data::Dumper for inspecting data structures?

Data::Dumper has two main uses: data persistence and debugging/inspecting objects. As far as I know, there isn't anything that's going to work exactly the same as Data::Dumper.

I use pickle for data persistence.

I use pprint to visually inspect my objects / debug.

I think the closest you will find is the pprint module.

>>> l = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> l.append(l)
>>> d = {1: l, 2: 'this is a string'}
>>> print d
{1: [1, 2, 3, 4, [...]], 2: 'this is a string'}

>>> pprint.pprint(d)
{1: [1, 2, 3, 4, <Recursion on list with id=47898714920216>],
 2: 'this is a string'}

Possibly a couple of alternatives: pickle, marshal, shelve.