Philip Mak wrote:
> I can't seem to get "do" to work. I did this:
>
> my $series_name;
> do "series_$series.i"; # <-- note include filename depends on a variable
> print "$series_name\n";
Your lexical ("my") variable in the same scope is taking precedence, and
the "do' is not allowed to see lexicals in its enclosing scope. If you
make $series_name a global, I think it will work. The alternative is to
read the file yourself and eval it, which would allow it to see the
lexical.
> I also tried the package thing:
>
> > What I do when I have things like config files is make actual unique
> > packages of them. For example:
> >
> > (In My/Module.pm)
> > package My::Module;
> > # don't use strict here
> > $foo = 7;
> >
> > (In some other program)
> > use My::Module;
> > print "$My::Module::foo\n";
>
> How would this work if the include filename has to depend on a variable? I
> think I have the parsing wrong; I kept getting error messages. e.g.
> something like:
>
> use $series;
> print "$$series::series_name\n";
If it depends on a variable, replace the "use" with "require". The
"use" statment is evaluated at compile time, and "require" at run time.
Keep in mind that require only loads each file once, so if you need to
show changes in these files that happen while the server is running this
won't work for you.
> > Honestly though, your example makes it look like you'd be better off with
> > dbm files and Tie::MLDBM or something.
>
> The database files would have to be human readable though, such that they
> can be edited by a text editor. The data that I am making includes an
> index to content that is maintained by other webmasters. The other
> webmasters don't even know how to use a UNIX shell, so I have to keep it
> simple for them. If I used a binary file format I'd have to make them
> learn the tools for changing it.
Depending on how much of this data you have and how timely it has to be,
you could make a cron that crawls the text files every 5 minutes or so
and build a dbm with their data in it.
- Perrin
