Trying to use a variable as a variable name (i.e. "symbolic references") is generally considered a bad idea.

There is an item in the perlfaq about this: How can I use a variable as a variable name?. I highly suggest you read this.

It is considered critical enough that it is explicitly detected and forbidden by use strict; - the inclusion of which is universally considered good practice.

Instead, use a hash variable:

  my %tag_value;

  foreach ( @tagvalue ) {
    if ( /([\w,_]+):([0-9]+)/ ) {
      $tag_value{$1} = $2;
    }
    else {
      die "Failed to assign value to $1\n";
    }
  }
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By the way I think your die statement is going to have a problem, in that $1 will not be set (at least not to what you think) if it ever gets executed. If the pattern match (regex) fails to match, then none of the positional variables ($1, etc.) get set. Instead, you might say something like:

      die "Failed to match tag/value in '$_'\n";
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