variable substition for packages

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi gurus. I need to know the syntax for substituting a variable for a package name. I can't seem to find it anywhere in my perl books. for example:

my $a = $test::countries;
[download]

$module = 'test';
my $a = ???
[download]

how would you replace the question marks? thanks so much. michael

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Re: variable substition for packages by jdporter (Paladin) on Jan 16, 2003 at 21:48 UTC
Like this: `$a = ${ $module . '::countries' };` [download] But note that you'll need to turn off strict references for this to work. That should tell you that it's probably a bad idea, right? But if you're doing object-oriented programming, you can use package names as "objects", like so: `$a = $module->countries;` [download] and you can defined `sub test::countries` to return the contents of that variable. jdporter The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: variable substition for packages by tall_man (Parson) on Jan 16, 2003 at 21:25 UTC
How about an eval? `my $a = eval "\$${module}::countries";` [download] (By the way, are you sure you want to do this? There may be better ways to do what you need than symbolic expansions that refer to global variables.) Update:For example, Avoid Symbolic References talks about how you can often use a hash instead.	[reply] [d/l]