Re: Answer: Reading Variables from a File

[Anonymous Monk]

I would submit that it is often better to read all the configuration information at once. Here's a snippet that uses this philosophy:

use strict;
 
my(%config) =
("variable1" => "default1",
 "variable2" => "default2");
 
&get_settings("myconfig",\%config);
 
sub get_settings{
  my($filename,$config_hash) = @_;
  my($var,$val);
 
  return unless ref $config_hash eq "HASH";
 
  open(CFGFILE,"<$filename")
    or die "Cannot open config file $filename: $!";
  while (<CFGFILE>){
    chomp;
    next if /^#/;
    ($var,$val) = split(/=/,$_,2);
    $config_hash->{$var} = $val if exists $config_hash->{$var};
  }
  close(CFGFILE);
}

Of course, there's always Config::General, but it's probably overkill and you may not be able to count on it being there for you.

[#include]

Part of the reason why I like to grab settings "on the fly" is because you can then change those settings at runtime. By grabbing the setting only when I need it, I can tweak the configuration file while the script is running. For settings that can't be changed while running, I load them in at the beginning of the script and store them in scalars.

A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.