in reply to Variable Interpolation

I suppose that simple interpolation "as in $foo" is not what you are looking for, then you can try something simple as:
$string=~s/(\$\w+)/$1/eeg
that will interpolate simple vars as $foo but nothing fancier (say $_->4)... though you can improve the regexp to match more complex expressions.

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Re^2: Variable Interpolation
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 29, 2005 at 16:17 UTC
    It also won't handle
    $string = '\\$var';     # escaped '$'
    and
    $string = '${foo}bar';  # $foo, not $foobar
    which serve necessary functions (unlike
    $string = '$_->[4]';
    which is just a feature).

    As a bonus, I've added support for \n and \t. It's easy to add the more escapes.

    The following code does, and like yours, limits the strings being eval'ed to a minumum.

    You can even get rid of eval completely if you don't interpolate from lexicals:

    All told, though, it's safer and cleaner to only interpolate from variables in hash:

    our %ESCAPES = ( n => "\n", t => "\t", ); sub interpolate { local *_ = \$_[0]; # Alias $_ to $_[0]. my $symtab = $_[1]; my $interpolated = ''; for (;;) { if (/\G \$(\w+) /gcsx || /\G \${(\w+)} /gcsx) { if (!exists($symtab->{$1})) { $interpolated .= "[unknown symbol \$$1]"; } elsif (!defined($symtab->{$1})) { $interpolated .= "[undefined symbol \$$1]"; } else { $interpolated .= $symtab->{$1}; } next; } if (/\G \\(.) /gcsx) { $interpolated .= exists($ESCAPES{$1}) ? $ESCAPES{$1} : $1; next; } /\G ( . # Catchall. (?: # These four lines are optional. (?!\\) # They are here to speed things up (?!\$) # by avoiding adding individual .)* # characters to the $interpolated. ) /gcsx && do { $interpolated .= $1; next; }; last; } return $interpolated; } my %symtab = ( string => "cheese", #user => $user, #... ); my $need_to_interpolate = 'smell my $string\n'; print interpolate($need_to_interpolate, \%symtab);