Ok, I asked this question in the chatterbox, but didn't quite understand/get what I was looking for, so I guess I'll have to post here. I have a few instances in a rather large program where I need to change the format of certain variables. What I'm trying to do is have it pass in the variable I need reformatted, and have it return that same scalar variable reformated. Can this be done, and if so how? For example I'm calling a date format function:

TimeStamp($date_created); #$date_created is YYYYMMDD

Where I want $date_created to be directly reformatted to MMDDYYYY, without using a module. Right now I'm using 5 functions to do the same thing :(

sub TimeStamp($) # Pass the stamp in as YYYYMMDD
{
    $_=$_[0];
    if( /(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/ )
    {   #returns in MMDDYYYY
        $date_created = "$2/$3/$1"
    }
    else { warn "Invalid input to TimeStamp()" }
}

[download]
Thanks for any ideas!

In reply to Dynamically changing the value of a passed variable into a sub by Willman023

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