in reply to Re^2: Write to and read from scalar
in thread Write to and read from scalar

The point is that certain functions expect to be passed filehandles for various purposes.

Sometimes the data you want to pass to these functions is actually held in a variable. The naive way of coping with that is to write out your data to a temporary file, open the file and pass the filehandle to the function. Often a better solution though is to construct a filehandle which points straight to the scalar variable, and not to a real file on disk.

Grandfather provides one technique, supported by Perl 5.8+. If (for some perverse reason) you want to support earlier releases of Perl, then IO::String also provides a solution using tied filehandles.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

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