Neighbour, above, gave you a good tip about using braces to disambiguate variable names.

There’s another way, not as general-purpose, but quick and dirty for the kind of thing you're doing: use a backslash.

print "$typ\::$dat\n";

HTH

In reply to Re: variables with colons by Sue D. Nymme
in thread variables with colons by SavannahLion

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