I have often wondered how I can take the results of a function call that returns a scalar, and immediately pass a reference to that scalar to another function. It seems easy enough to do with Arrays and Hashes, but is it possible with Scalars?

sub get_string {
  return "the string"
}

sub put_string_ref {
  my $ref = shift;
  print "$ref -> $$ref\n";
}

# Can I reduce the following two lines to one
my $string = get_string();
&put_string_ref(\$string);

[download]

I have tried several things, like the following:

put_string_ref(\{get_string()});
put_string_ref(\${get_string()});
put_string_ref(\$&get_string);
put_string_ref(\{&get_string});

[download]

but can't find anything that works. Am I missing the obvious, or is this just not possible?

In case anyone is wondering why I want to do this, I quite often take the output of HTML::Template and pass it to HTML::FillInForm as a scalar ref.

In reply to Working with references to scalars by cees

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