A program reads in a template (not mine) which has fields defined 

first=one
second=two

then it reads in another file with stuff like

"adding $first and $second we get third"

i loop through the variables from the template, and pretty
much do this for each one (assume $newstring points at the
string above):

{
($variable, $value) = split("=", $linefromtemplate);
$$variable = $value;
$newstring = eval("return \"$newstring\");
}

Not beautiful I agree...but seemed a quick way of doing what
I want - only I dont want the newly associated variables
to be applicable outside of the scope of the block they 
are declared in.

(And strict complains about it too)

Thanks

Specimen

That template looks like it was written for a shell.

Anyways I would use a hash for the keys and regular expression substitution. So the first file would be read like:

my @entry = split(/=/, $line, 2);
$val{$entry[0]} = $entry[1];
[download]

and then substitute them in with:

s/\$(\w+)/exists($val{$1})?$val{$1}:die "Undefined '$1' in entry '$new
+string' (line $.)"/eg;
[download]

Now strict should be happy, and things are easy to scope. Plus I stuck a minimal error check in.

Oh, and strangle the person who wrote the stupid template willya?

Yup - combining a few messy sh scripts into a perl one.

Thanks. I'll try doing that - i was actually going to do that initially - thought i'd take the easy route out and let eval do all my work for me though.

Specimen

• You probably should use a high-quality templating CPAN module, such as Template or Text::Template
• If you insist on homegrowing your tmeplate module, the chief means of isolating variables within Perl are packages or hashes.
  1. For hashes, here's a snippet:

     {
        my %template_var;
     
        my ($key,$val) = split '=', $linefromtemplate;
        $template_var{$key} = $val;
     }
     [download]

  2. And for packages, here's another:

     {
        package template_var;
     
        my ($key,$val) = split '=', $linefromtemplate;
     no strict 'refs';
       $$key = $val;# left out symbolic dereference
     use strict 'refs';
     }
     [download]

     I woulda caught my error if we could preview replies to other posts...Why dont we enable that?