What you want is to use one of the many templating systems. See Template for a selection of those.

If you're hell-bent on rolling your own, just to keep the precious Perl variables, my suggestion is to declare them explicitly in a hash and to replace them with a tiny loop:

my %template_variables = (
    'navytext' => $navytext,
    # ...
);

my $css = <<'CSS';
#tabmenu {
          color: #$navytext;
         }
CSS

sub fill_template {
    my( $str, $vars ) = @_;
    $str =~ s!\$(\w+)!$template{ $1 } || '$' . $1!ge;
    $str
};

print fill_template( $css , \%template_variables );

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In reply to Re: Perl variables embedded in CSS in a CSS file not resolving correctly when the file is linked in by Corion
in thread Perl variables embedded in CSS in a CSS file not resolving correctly when the file is linked in by craigt

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