Re: sorting a hash that's in another file

[snax]

Well, if you're confident that you can read in just the hash definition -- say into an array -- and that you're sure that there's no way that this would end up being tainted maliciously, you can use join to get it all into one string and then eval to execute it.

[alienhuman]

Hmm. I was a lot more confident until all those bold tags started showing up ;).

Seriously, I'm working on my pattern match now, and it's non-trivial (at least for me), so if anyone has an alternative to doing something like:

open SCRIPT, "script.pl" or die "you scurvy dog";
while (<SCRIPT>) {
  if ( grep(/\[... insert insane pattern match here ...]%some_hash[...
+ and here ...]/, $_) ) {

I'm eager to hear. I wish that I could just require the script w the hash in it, but that will not work right.

AH

[snax]

Well, off the top of my head, I think this would work:

open SCRIPT, "script.pl" or die "you scurvy dog";
while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Find the declaration
   next unless /\%some_hash/;
   $hash_declaration = $_;
   # Now pop out and do another while loop
   last;
}
while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Keep appending until we reach a semi-colon
   $hash_declaration .= $_;
   last if /;/;
}
eval($hash_declaration);

But this assumes that you won't have a semi colon in the hash declaration in script.pl. There's a zillion ways to do the reading-in part, too, beyond just a smarter test for when you're done.

[cLive ;-)]

A very inefficient, but valid way of ensuring it works;

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

open SCRIPT, "script.pl" or die "Can't open file: $!";

our $hash_declaration='';
our %some_hash;

while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Find the declaration
   next unless /\%some_hash/;
   $hash_declaration = $_;
   # Now pop out and do another while loop
   last;
}
while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Keep appending until we reach a semi-colon
   $hash_declaration .= $_;
   eval $hash_declaration;
   last unless $@;
}
close(SCRIPT);

print Data::Dumper->Dumper(\%some_hash);

.02

cLive ;-)