I have a Perl script that is being deployed at several different sites. To allow each site to customize the appearance of the HTML generated, I have an INI file with a number of NAME=VALUE pairs. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to assign a value to a variable name that is stored in a variable. For example, if I have the following in my INI file:

$NAME=John Smith

I'd like to be able to read $NAME into $var1 and John Smith into $var2, and then assign what's in $var2 to the variable name stored in $var1.

I can currently work around this. Here is my script thus far:

sub read_ini()
{
  my @file = read_file("recorder.ini");
  my $line = 0;
  my $pos = 0;
  my $var = "";
  my $val;
  
  for(@file)
  {
    if(substr(@file[$line],0,1) ne "#")
    {
      $pos = index(@file[$line],"=");
      if($pos > 0)
      {
        $var = substr(@file[$line],0,$pos);
    $val = substr(@file[$line],$pos + 1, length(@file[$line]) - $pos);
    if($var eq "NAME")
      { $NAME = $val; }
    elsif($var eq "OFFICE")
      { $OFFICE = $val; }
        # And so on for other instances
      }
    }

    $line++;
  }
}

[download]

Can I use a hash to accomplish what I described above? I'm sorry for sounding ignorant, but I'm still new to Perl.

Thanks!

In reply to Reading from an INI file by MrCromeDome

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