categorized answer QandAEditors Use an array (or a hash). What you're trying to do now smells like symbolic refrences, which are just yicky (to use the technical term ) and make your code harder to write and maintain. <p> You will also need to use the [s|/e] modifier (which causes Perl to eval the right-side as an expression). <code> use strict; my @red; $red[1]='black'; $red[2]='red'; $line =~ s/\$red(\d)/$red[$1]/ge; </code> 20361