Does Perl have PHP-like dynamic variables?

Question

In PHP, I can write:

$vname = \'phone\';
$$vname = \'555-1234\';
print $phone;

... And the script will output \"555-1234\".

Is ther

Answer 1

You can't do this with the strict pragma enabled, and the strict pragma should usually always be enabled. You can do it with the pragma off though, take a look at this one liner:

perl -le 'my $vname = "phone"; ${ $vname } = "555-1234"; print $phone'

That will work, but this will not:

perl -Mstrict -le 'my $vname = "phone"; ${ $vname } = "555-1234"; print $phone'

"-Mstrict" tells it to "use strict".

It is almost always better to use a hash for something like this, which is about the same as an associative array in PHP.