Hey Wise ones,

I am pretty new to perl, and I've been through most of the perl man pages many many times, tried many things but am still stuck!

I want to include something from an external file as data I am passing to a subroutine. What I am trying to do is the following:

Read data from files, print the data to another file after formatting etc. And then dump that data that processed data into a subroutine.

I am reading in numbers from several files, and formatting that data into matrices so that I can pass it to the gnuplot subroutine that is part of the Chart::Graph::Gnuplot module.

So for example, My data file might look like the following: 

 [{ "title" => "line 1", "style" => "lines" , "type" => "matrix"}, [ 1
+, 6318 ], [ 2, 7903 ], [ 3, 25617 ], ]
[{ "title" => "line 2", "style" => "lines" , "type" => "matrix"}, [ 1,
+ 6215 ], [ 2, 7831 ], [ 3, 25782 ],]

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and I want to pass that data from the file to my perl script as if it was actually written within the script; like so: 

gnuplot({ "title" => "My Trend",
          "output type" => "png",
          "output file" => "$TMPDIR/trend-$$.png"},
           DATA_FROM_FILE
       );

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Is there a way to do this so that perl thinks that DATA_FROM_FILE points to the contents of the file? Im thinking some sort of reference to a filehandle should work, but I have yet to make it work...

I know in bourne shell you can use back tics to "reference" the output of a command, so for example: 

DATA=`cat /tmp/MY_DATA`

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so that whenever I use $DATA it appears to the script that whatever cat /tmp/MY_DATA produces, actually looks like part of the script...
Any Ideas? I am beyond stuck!
TIA!
Dave

In reply to file contents as a part of code? by djwaddel

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