in reply to Variable expansion

You save perl-code to a database as string, and then read it from the database und want to evaluate it? Then eval might give you a helping hand...

I can't give you a code-example because I am not sure what your string retrieved from the databases is like and how the rest of the script looks like...

Best regards,
perl -le "s==*F=e=>y~\*martinF~stronat~=>s~[^\w]~~g=>chop,print"