Good Morning. I poked around, and found some .cgi discussions about this, but did not find an exact answer to my question. I thought an eval{$string} would do it, but lets get to it, shall we?

I have a file, we'll call sql_string.sql that has a sql string in it, written to have some variable names in it. I want to read in that string, then send it to a sub along with HASHREF that contains the necessary variables. Then I want to swap out those var names for the var values. Maybe I need to explicitly deference the HASHREF? Any help would be great. BTW, I am not sure if there is better pragma for this. I am going to be doing a lot of switching on some SQL for various uses. i don't want to inline the SQL, and I want to be able assign values to various pieces for multiple use, so additional style comments are always welcome.

my ($sql_var_hr);
$$sql_var_hr{col_name} = 'column_name';
my $sql = get_sql($sql_han, $sql_var_hr);


sub get_sql {
    my ($file_han, $vars) = @_; #vars is a hashref containing any swit
+ch variables for the select
    my ($iline, $sql);
    
    print "vars: $$vars{col_name}\n";
    
    while ($iline = <DATA>) {
        if ($iline =~ /^#/) {
            next;
        }
        else {    
            $sql = $sql.$iline;
        }
    }
    print "pre_eval: $sql\n";
    eval{$sql};
    print "post_eval: $sql\n";
    return $sql;
}

#the following are just attempts
__DATA__
select $vars{col_name} from schema.table
select $$vars{col_name} from schema.table
select ${$var{col_name}} from schema.table
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