This parses OK

It shouldn't. The line 'my %config = {};' should trigger the error 'Reference found where even-sized list expected'

Assuming we change it to 'my %config = ();' it still doesn't work, since %config is lexically scoped and the do block doesn't seem to be able to access lexically scoped variables. If you change it to:

our %config = ();

Then you should get the effect you're after.

Having said that, evaluating a config file to set global variables is not a great idea. In fact this is the exact problem XML::Simple was written to solve. If your config file was called scriptname.xml and looked like this:

  <config>
    <username>zxcvb</username>
    <password>zzzzz</password>
  </config>

[download]

Then you could use it like this:

use XML::Simple;

my $config = XMLin();

print $config->{username};

[download]

In real life, you would set explicit values for XMLin's keyattr and forcearray options and you'd probably also want to investigate the caching options.

In reply to Re: "do" what? by grantm
in thread "do" what? by cLive ;-)

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