Hello,

I have the following code. It works and does what I pretty much want it to do, but it doesn't look the greatest. I was wondering if there is a better, cleaner approach to doing the same thing. Originally the $string had $i, but that errored out due to the fact that $i wasn't defined yet and because I needed it to be evaluated inside the for loop to expand it. Also, I was hoping to simply eval the string, but it isn't real Perl code so that wasn't a viable option.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

### This eval code snippet works ###
eval(my $ref2 = "parent_ref");
####################################

my $string = "first_string ref[i] second_string $ref2.ref[i] third_str
+ing";
my $new_string;
my $i;

for ($i=0; $i<5; $i++) {
    print "$i : ";
    $new_string = $string; # don't clobber original string, else searc
+h-and-replace fails after first loop
    $new_string =~ s/\[i\]/\[$i\]/g;
    print "$new_string\n";
}

[download]

And the output looks like this:

0 : first_string ref[0] second_string parent_ref.ref[0] third_string
1 : first_string ref[1] second_string parent_ref.ref[1] third_string
2 : first_string ref[2] second_string parent_ref.ref[2] third_string
3 : first_string ref[3] second_string parent_ref.ref[3] third_string
4 : first_string ref[4] second_string parent_ref.ref[4] third_string

[download]

Anyways, I'm just hoping there's a better way to possibly do this that is probably more advanced than my Perl skillset allows.

Thanks, Joe W.

In reply to Evaluating variables within a string by smknjoe

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