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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T22:33:09+00:00

I’m working on a Perl script where the user adds a number of set

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I’m working on a Perl script where the user adds a number of set variables at the beginning of the script, all prefixed with $XX, as seen below. The user-set variables, however, need to go through a short transformation function to clean them up.

Is there a way to run the sub on all the variables with the $XX prefix?

my $XXvar1 = "something";
my $XXvar2 = "something";
my $XXvar3 = "something";
my $XXvar4 = "something";

sub processVar {
    my $fixVar = $_[0];
    # Do stuff
    return $fixVar;
}

# This obviously doesn't work. Use some kind of loop or something? How...
$XXvar* = processVar($XXvar*);

Edit:
I’m trying to do this now with a hash, as per some suggestions on Google:

my %XX;

$XX{var1} = "something 1";
$XX{var2} = "something 2";
$XX{var3} = "something 3";
$XX{var4} = "something 4";

I can then work with the keys and values in for or while loops. However, how can I reassign each variable to the transformed one in the loop?

Edit again:
Got it. This for loop processes all the variables successfully:

for my $key ( keys %XX ) {
    $XX{$key} = processVar($XX{$key});
}

I’m definitely going to try to make a configuration file now, though, as suggested below. Now I just have to figure that out 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Instead of users editing the source and providing odd variable names, use a configuration file instead. Every user can get his own configuration file. There are several modules on CPAN to handle configuration files of just about any format, and I talk about ways to configure Perl programs in a chapter of Mastering Perl. It’s certainly a lot easier than the tricks you’d need to do to magically pick up these variable names.

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