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From: jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu (Joe Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Can I force " expansion on a string?
Message-ID: <JES.90Aug22174345@mbio.med.upenn.edu>
Date: 22 Aug 90 21:43:45 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Lines: 33


Is there function call or idiom to get Perl to do double-quote
expansion on the contents of a string?  I'm still a little squeamish
using 'eval...', at least as I understand, it won't do what I want.

Why, you ask?  Well, I wanted to use perl to do some simple macro
processing on information read from a file.  If perl would do the
replacement, it would save scanning the lines explicitly in my code.

A contrived example which (when run) demonstrates the problem:

#!/bin/sh
echo 'The time is now $TIME' | perl -ne '

	sub showtime { join("-",@_); }

	$TIME = &showtime(localtime(time));

	print "
I want this to print
  The time is now $TIME,
not
  $_";'


Any suggestions?

<Joe
--
 Joe Smith
 University of Pennsylvania                    jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu
 Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics          (215) 898-8348
 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6059