Yet according to the documentation it is ignored unless INTERPOLATE=1 is set, and the colour coding from vim-perl suggests the same.

I doubt this is that badly documented, what am I missing? Why is the '$' sign vital in there when it (seemingly) shouldn't be?

See https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Template-Toolkit/lib/Template/Manual/Syntax.pod#Tag-Styles 

    # INTERPOLATE = 0
    <td>[% name %]</td>
    <td>[% email %]</td>

    # INTERPOLATE = 1
    <td>$name</td>
    <td>$email</td>

[download]

Compare to https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Template-Toolkit/lib/Template/Manual/Variables.pod#Hash-Array-References and https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Template-Toolkit/lib/Template/Manual/Variables.pod#Variable-Interpolation

In reply to Re^3: how to pass hash to perl template toolkit by beech
in thread how to pass hash to perl template toolkit by srins

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