Using a dynamically generated variable name in Perl's strict mode

Question

Basically, I would like to grab the contents of a variable named in a dynamically generated string, but all efforts to accomplish this in strict mode have failed. There are several posts about similar problems, but none seem to have solutions that have worked for me.

This is what I want to do:

# Fields:
$q1 = "ex. data 1";
$q2 = "ex. data 2";
$q3 = "ex. data 3";
$q4 = "ex. data 4";
$q5 = "ex. data 5";

# retrieve the desired field name.  q1, q2, q3, q4, or q5.
$field_name = fetch_the_desired_field_name();

# fetch the contents of the named field.  ex. data 1, ex. data 2, etc.
$contents_of_desired_field = $$field_name;

print $contents_of_desired_field;

Is there a way to do this in strict mode? In other posts about similar problems, people say that hashes are the answer, but I can't seem to quite grasp how to do this with a hash. It goes without saying that this is a very simplified example. In the actual code, there are 115 possible field names, all pulled from a database, with unpredictable contents.

Answer 1

To do this with a hash:

Store:

$myHash{q3} = "ex. data 3";

Retrieve:

$result = $myHash{q3};

This has multiple benefits such as:

• Satisfies "use strict";

• You can loop over all the field names via keys %myHash

• Since the field names are a list as per the last point, you can do any other list operations on them if needed (map, grep) etc...

  • For example, to get only the values where field name is of a form "q[1-5]", you can do:

    @subset = @myHash{ grep m/q[1-5]/ keys %myHash }; # Use a slice @{} operator.
    

  • Most database APIs (e.g. DBI) have calls which will automatically return back this exact format of a hash (or rather a hash reference instead) when querying a row from a table

    $hash_ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref;