in reply to Form letters: eval a string to substutite perl variables

I would highly recommend using Template Toolkit. TT makes this kind of stuff trivial, and handles layout much better than a homegrown solution.

TT is not just for HTML.

Template can be as easy as:

Dear [% salutation %] [% last_name %], You may have won 1 million dollars. Thanks,


grep
One dead unjugged rabbit fish later