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The following is a short subroutine that lets you implement a rudimentary template system, where a word specified in square brackets is replaced by the return value of that method call in a given object.

Caveats:

Does not filter which methods are allowed and which are not. If there's a "dangerous" method in your object, be careful.
Assumes the person creating a template is trustworthy, and that a typo/bad method name will not cause critical problems.

This will probably become a module in the future, with added safety features and customizability. But if you need to handroll a quick-and-dirty template (such as reading fields from a database and sending E-mails), this can get you started.

sub apply_template
  {
    my ($object, $template) = @_;

    $template =~ s/\[(\w+)\]/$object->$1/emg;

    return $template;
  }

# Example usage:

my $template = "Hello [name]. You are [age] years old!";

# We assume there is an object called "Person" with 
# accessor methods for "name" and "age".

my $monkey = new Person ();
$monkey->name("Maybelle");
$monkey->age(4);

my $message = apply_template($monkey, $template);

# prints "Hello Maybelle. You are 4 years old!"
print $messane, "\n";
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In reply to A quick and dirty template system by rrwo

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