Re: Accessing variables in an external hash without eval

[Athanasius]

Hello victorz22,

I tried using eval...

Actually, this is a job for the do EXPR syntax (see do). With data file dir/hash_file.txt under the script’s directory and its contents corrected as per kevbot’s answer, the following script:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

our %hash;

cycleUsesForLibs('./dir', 'Scope', 'hash_file.txt', 'model');

sub cycleUsesForLibs
{
    my ($fileDirectory, $scopeName, $fileName, $modelName) = @_;

    chdir  $fileDirectory;
    do     $fileName;
    my     @hashData = $hash{$scopeName}{$modelName};
    my     @dereferencedData;
    push   @dereferencedData, @$_ for @hashData;
    print "Data: \n", Dumper(@dereferencedData);
}

gives this output:

14:35 >perl 1777_SoPW.pl
Data:
$VAR1 = 'data I need';
$VAR2 = 'another row of needed data';
$VAR3 = 'more data I need';

14:36 >

Note:

1. With use strict in place (as it always should be!), it’s necessary to declare our %hash before referencing it in $hash{$scopeName}{$modelName}.
2. You want @dereferencedData to contain all the lines of data, not just the last one, so you need to push these onto the array. The code you show just overwrites the array on each iteration of the foreach loop.

Hope that helps,