You know, that strangely looks like the saint way of doing things :-)

Although, if you really want to talk uber-demi-God way of doing things, look into the source of CGI.pm and look at the way Lincoln D. Stein has implemented the backward-compatible (with Steve Brenner's cgi-lib.pl) method of Vars with surprisingly little code ...

sub Vars {
    my $q = shift;
    my %in;
    tie(%in,CGI,$q);
    return %in if wantarray;
    return \%in;
}
[download]

 

perl -e 's&&rob@cowsnet.com.au&&&split/[@.]/&&s&.com.&_&&&print'