Hello Respected Monks,

In my program I have two functions. Both are almost the same except that one extracts the value of $1 from the regex m/\s*(\S+)\s*(\S+)\s*(\S+)\s*(\S+)\s*/ and the other extracts the value of $2.
So I thought why not merge these into one function. and pass the column number which I want to extract as a parameter? So I wrote code like 

        if ($columnNumber == 2)
        {
          push @sps, $2 if ($2);
        }
        elsif ($columnNumber == 3)
        {
          push @sps, $3 if ($3);
        }

[download]
but I don't like this ifelse approach. Can't I do it shorter by avoiding this if else?
Something like 
push @sps, $($columnNumber) if ($($columnNumber));

[download]
So that the columnNumber automatically substitues itself inside the $1/$2/$3 expression.
But this code is wrong and doesn't even compile How can I make a variable substribute the 1 in $1.

In reply to How to remove the $1 hard coding by abhishes

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