Hmm. I was a lot more confident until all those bold tags started showing up ;).

Seriously, I'm working on my pattern match now, and it's non-trivial (at least for me), so if anyone has an alternative to doing something like:

open SCRIPT, "script.pl" or die "you scurvy dog";
while (<SCRIPT>) {
  if ( grep(/\[... insert insane pattern match here ...]%some_hash[...
+ and here ...]/, $_) ) {
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I'm eager to hear. I wish that I could just require the script w the hash in it, but that will not work right.

AH

Well, off the top of my head, I think this would work:

open SCRIPT, "script.pl" or die "you scurvy dog";
while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Find the declaration
   next unless /\%some_hash/;
   $hash_declaration = $_;
   # Now pop out and do another while loop
   last;
}
while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Keep appending until we reach a semi-colon
   $hash_declaration .= $_;
   last if /;/;
}
eval($hash_declaration);
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But this assumes that you won't have a semi colon in the hash declaration in script.pl. There's a zillion ways to do the reading-in part, too, beyond just a smarter test for when you're done.

A very inefficient, but valid way of ensuring it works;

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

open SCRIPT, "script.pl" or die "Can't open file: $!";

our $hash_declaration='';
our %some_hash;

while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Find the declaration
   next unless /\%some_hash/;
   $hash_declaration = $_;
   # Now pop out and do another while loop
   last;
}
while (<SCRIPT>) {
   # Keep appending until we reach a semi-colon
   $hash_declaration .= $_;
   eval $hash_declaration;
   last unless $@;
}
close(SCRIPT);

print Data::Dumper->Dumper(\%some_hash);
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.02

cLive ;-)