Thank you very much. It solved my problem. I can use eval without worry as i am the one who is creating the file. -Vinay

And you never make mistakes? :)

I would worry about making mistakes, maybe not today, but a week from now, so I would avoid string eval unless this was a single-use-program, only to be used once

Otherwise I would use String::Interpolate or String::Interpolate::RE or another similar abstraction instead