in reply to Re^2: reference to an undefined key
in thread reference to an undefined key
As to the inherent dangers of elaborating things as you suggest, the one that comes to mind is -- you'd better only make use of key/value pairs in the order they're resolved, or you may come up against infinite recursion. For example:
[ConfigDirs] A = /some/dir B = /_#C#_/DeeperDir C = /_#B#_/EvenDeeperDir
which would never fully expand (B references C, which references B again). So you wouldn't want to necessarily make that into a hash; a list would be more appropriate I think, as you could throw an error any time you came across a variable which hadn't previously been defined.
Here's an example that uses an array (hardwired, but you could read it in from a config file), and then creates a hash of resolved parameters:
#!/usr/bin/perl ############### ## Libraries ## ############### use strict; use warnings; use feature qw{ say }; ################## ## User-defined ## ################## # Define what makes a "template" variable my $re_template = qr/_#([^#]+)#_/; # The result of what you read from your config file, perhaps. # Note that it's an ARRAY, since we'd like to prevent unintentional # recursion (we should resolve template variables in the order in # which they're seen). my $a_params = [ [ 'A' => '/some/dir' ], [ 'B' => '/_#A#_/DeeperDir' ], [ 'C' => '/_#B#_/EvenDeeperDir' ], ]; ################## ## Main program ## ################## show_params($a_params, "[Before resolution]"); my $h_resolved = resolve_templates($a_params); show_params($h_resolved, "[After resolution]"); ################# ## Subroutines ## ################# sub resolve_templates { my ($a_params) = @_; my $h_resolved = { }; for (my $i = 0; $i < @$a_params; $i++) { my $idx = $i + 1; my $a_keyval = $a_params->[$i]; my ($key, $tmpl) = @$a_keyval; my $orig = $tmpl; while ($tmpl =~ /$re_template/) { my $ref = $1; my $refval = $h_resolved->{$ref}; defined($refval) or die "Undefined ref '$ref' in '$orig'\n +"; $tmpl =~ s/$re_template/$refval/g; } $h_resolved->{$key} = $tmpl; } return $h_resolved; } sub show_params { my ($a_params, $msg) = @_; $msg ||= "Parameters:"; say "-" x 79; say $msg; say "-" x 79; if (ref $a_params eq 'HASH') { # If a HASH was passed, turn it into an ARRAY my $h_params = $a_params; my @keys = sort { $a cmp $b } keys %$h_params; $a_params = [ map { [ $_ => $h_params->{$_} ] } @keys ]; } foreach my $a_keyval (@$a_params) { my ($key, $val) = @$a_keyval; my $text = "Parameter '$key' "; $text .= "." x (32 - length($text)); $text .= " '$val'"; say $text; } say ""; }
And here its output:
---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- [Before resolution] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- Parameter 'A' .................. '/some/dir' Parameter 'B' .................. '/_#A#_/DeeperDir' Parameter 'C' .................. '/_#B#_/EvenDeeperDir' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- [After resolution] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- Parameter 'A' .................. '/some/dir' Parameter 'B' .................. '//some/dir/DeeperDir' Parameter 'C' .................. '///some/dir/DeeperDir/EvenDeeperDir'