Alternatively, break the rules again and just open the scalar as if it were a file

Yes, sure. I said "no easy way", not "no way at all". But you still cannot do nested elements.

You shouldn't need nested tables. If you find yourself needing a table in another table, that is probably because one table is there just for the layout of the page. And such a table isn't created with something like this, because you need attributes badly.

You may tell me what I "should", but when people are paying me to put tables in tables, I prefer not to argue. Besides, I addressed my need of attributes, right? :-)

I meant the code to be simple. To get there, I broke quite some unwritten rules about purity and reusability. It was not my intention to support anything more than printing simple tables.

Acknowledged and appreciated. I am not saying "thou shalt not print", just I often find myself needing to stuff it into a variable. Or nested tables. I just took inspiration from it, to do my own thing. Personally, I never find myself writing "simple tables" (no one is paying for that), so to me the inspiring thing was the code layout, and I tried to work out how I could make my code look like that.

The Sidhekin
print "Just another Perl ${\(trickster and hacker)},"