Apologies if I have my terminology wrong but I have a module that will substitute %foo with $var{'default'}{'foo'} and %foo.bar with $var{'foo'}{'bar'} doing something like 
$work =~ s{%(\w+)(?:\.(\w+))?}{
    defined $2
        ? $var{$1}{$2}
        : $var{default}{$1}
}eg;

[download]
I'd like to extend this to cover any level of nesting so that %a.deeply.nested.value would return $var{'a'}{'deeply'}{'nested'}{'value'} and the only thing I've come up with is a function that splits on the '.' and loops through the array to build a statement I can eval but I'm sure there has to be a more elegant way. If possible I'd like to avoid lookbehinds/lookaheads to keep the code portable to languages that don't support that. I'm also thinking I should I should be using $var{'foo'} instead of $var{'default'}{'foo'} so feel free to leave that out of any suggested solutions.

In reply to Recursively substitute against multidimensional hash by Maelstrom

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.