I am but an egg, so perhaps I am missing something very basic, but I tried to do this and it didn't want to cooperate with write (it worked just fine with print). Since the point of my exercise is to avoid having to convert a large and complicated format into, well, anything else, I really was hoping to be able to capture the output of write to a variable. (If I have to use print, I might as well convert the whole thing to lots of little $var .= "my strings go here" which would be sub-optimal for other reasons.) Here's what's been happening:

use IO::Scalar;

my $bufferVar = "";
my $SH = new IO::Scalar \$bufferVar;
print $SH "Hi there, 1.";   ### This works just dandy.

select ($SH);
print "Hi there, 2.";  ### This also works. $bufferVar now contains "H
+i there, 1.Hi there, 2."

$~ = "myFirstFormat";  ### Allegedly this is happy.  I have tested thi
+s format independently, and it works fine.

write ;  ### This barfs.
[download]

It says: write() on unopened filehandle IO::Scalar::FH at format_test.cgi line 29 (#1) (W unopened) An I/O operation was attempted on a filehandle that was never initialized. You need to do an open(), a sysopen(), or a socket() call, or call a constructor from the FileHandle package.

Help?