Back-story: I have a Perl CGI program. The CGI program needs to utilize variables in one of several separate configuration files (packages). The different packages all contain the same variables, but with different values for those variables. Each package represents a different language for a multilingual interface for the CGI program. e.g. English.pm, French.pm, Spanish.pm.
The CGI program can't determine which language package is needed until it parses the form input and does a test based on the value for a query string name/value pair. Based on the test, I assign a value to a package load command (i.e. 'use English' or 'require English'). Because of that, I can't load the package with "use Package" since "use" runs at compile time, before I can assign a value to it. So I am using the 'require' command, which executes at runtime. All's good so far. Problem: When loading a module with 'require' AND ALSO using 'use strict' I can't figure out how to utilize those package variables *without* also using an explicit package name (e.g. $English::button_label). Doing so is pretty straightforward if I had been able to use 'use English', but it's not straightforward (at least to me) on how to do it using 'require English' [1]. At issue again, is not knowing what the appropriate package name will be until runtime. I can brute force within the CGI program by doing it along these lines (which also requires that I set "no strict 'refs'": my ($var_1,$var_2,$var_3,$var_4); { no strict 'refs'; $var_1 = ${$lang_package . "::" . "var_1"}; $var_2 = ${$lang_package . "::" . "var_2"}; $var_3 = ${$lang_package . "::" . "var_3"}; $var_4 = ${$lang_package . "::" . "var_4"}; } Below is what I want to do, reduced to the minimum (i.e. I want test.cgi to print out the variable without specifying the package name): test.cgi ======== #!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; my $lang_package_file = "English.pm"; require $lang_package_file; print "My package variable \$language value is $language" . "\n"; # This doesn't work [2] exit(0); English.pm ========== package English; $language = "English"; 1; I know I can turn off "use strict" but I've tried to walk the straight and narrow with recent programming efforts, and I hate to start backsliding. There's got to be a better, more elegant way to do this and maintain 'use strict' in the main CGI program, I'm just not getting it at the moment... -- Michael [1] I'm referring to using this stuff in the package, which works great with 'use English' but not so great (for me anyway) with 'require English'. package English; require Exporter; @ISA = qw(Exporter); @EXPORT = qw($language $etc); [2] I get this when I run test.cgi: Global symbol "$language" requires explicit package name at test.cgi line 5. Execution of test.cgi aborted due to compilation errors. # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian # University of Texas at Arlington # 817-272-5326 office # 817-688-1926 mobile # [EMAIL PROTECTED] # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/