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

Hello, I've never used Perl but I'm going to do a project where i will need to read a text and execute it. Meaning the program should be able to receive (for example) the text :Print 'Hello World'; and do execute(Print 'Hello World'). After that, I'll need to receive a function (in plain text), and be able to execute it (may have parameters). Does anyone know how can i start to do this? Where should i begin? thanks

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Re: Executing text
by duff (Parson) on Nov 26, 2003 at 14:37 UTC
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Re: Executing text
by BazB (Priest) on Nov 26, 2003 at 15:06 UTC

    As duff suggests, you should read perlsec.
    Just to stress the point: accepting input from an untrusted source - especially when that input will be eval'ed by perl - can be a serious security hole.

    Imagine if the input was `rm -rf /`...

    If the information in this post is inaccurate, or just plain wrong, don't just downvote - please post explaining what's wrong.
    That way everyone learns.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Sounds like you want to learn the eval command in Perl, and might want to take a look at Text::Template.
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