Unexpected results with expression for file handle in print

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

The following piece of code works exactly as I would expect:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict; 
use warnings; 

my $f=\*stdout; 
my $h={}; 
 
$h->{FILE}=$f; 

print  $f  "Hello\n";
[download]

But this doe not, it gives a syntax error:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict; 
use warnings; 

my $f=\*stdout; 
my $h={}; 
 
$h->{FILE}=$f; 

print $h->{FILE} "Hello\n";
[download]

The only change is that I use an expression involving hashref for the file handle in the second case rather than a variable. Is this not allowed?

Comment on Unexpected results with expression for file handle in print Select or Download Code

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Re: Unexpected results with expression for file handle in print by tobyink (Canon) on Feb 13, 2014 at 10:24 UTC
Use this: `print {$h->{FILE}} "Hello\n";` [download] Perl only understands very simple expressions as filehandles, but you can wrap more complex expressions in braces. This is covered in the documentation for print. `use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name`	[reply] [d/l]