atemerev

I'm away from a perl interpreter right now so this little snippet (from the the Perl Cookbook, recipe 11.4) will just have to do:

my %commands = (
    "happy" => \&joy,
    "sad"   => \&sullen,
    "done"  => sub { die "See ya!" },
    "mad"   => \&angry,
);

print "How are you? ";
chomp($string = <STDIN>);
if ($commands{$string}) {
    $commands{$string}->();
} else {
    print "No such command: $string\n";
}
[download]

The idea here is to store your function/method references in a hash (%commands). Then you call the method by looking it up in the hash, and passing in the params. I don't remember the exact context for this, but, most of the time when you're using eval'd strings or "soft references" you can use a hash to achieve the same results.

Good luck with it!

Kurt