I like this method...
maybe in a table called constants with two columns - name and value (kinda like a hash).

That is what I'm doing, but how do I make it where the column "name" is like a variable, for instance if record 1 was this:

color1

red

How could I get it to have $color1 contain the value?

In other words, in case I did not make it clear...

$string1 = qq!Hello, my favorite color is $color1!;
How would I get using a database to do that, using Perl?
I don't see how the Export would do that, or the other things you showed.

thx,
Richard