While what you describe is possible in principle through Perl built-ins, it's usually best to use the technique of a dispatch table:

my %record_seq_handler= (
    'A' => \&unpack_a,
    'B' => \&unpack_B,
    'C' => \&unpack_C,
);

my $handler= $record_seq_handler{ $RECORD_SEQ_ID }
    or die "Unknown record sequence '$RECORD_SEQ_ID'";
$handler->( $lines[$_] );

[download]

The way you described directly would be through eval, but this approach has various pitfalls that the above code avoids.

In reply to Re: execute a string as a function by Corion
in thread execute a string as a function by fionbarr

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