Well, let's see:
The -w after #!/usr/bin/perl will give you warning messages... That's where the
uninitialized variable stuff comes from.
When I tried the code, it also complained about assigning a value to a read-only var
(the $$1 = $2).
Here's a solution I came up with that uses a hash to store the names (good for
scalability for longer lists).
01 #!/usr/bin/perl -w
02
03 use strict;
04 use diagnostics;
05 my %names;
06
07 print '$names{\'James\'}: ' . $names{'James'} . "\n";
08
09 open("FP", "< config");
10
11 while(<FP>) {
12 chomp;
13 /^(\w+)\s+=\s+\"(.*)\"/;
14 # print "$1 is $2\n"; # Debug
15 $names{$1} = $2;
16 }
17
18 close(FP);
19
20 print '$names{\'James\'}: '.$names{'James'}."\n";
21
22 exit 0;
-- G
begin Peter Jay Salzman quotation:
> this stuff is way above my head.
>
> here is a program (that works) which reads a text file with lines of the form
>
> James = "William"
> Leonard = "DeForest"
> Montgomery = "James"
>
> and sets the variable $James to "William", and so on. note that line 3 is
> commented out.
>
> 1 #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> 2 use diagnostics;
> 3 #my $James;
> 4
> 5 open("FP", "< config");
> 6 while(<FP>) {
> 7 chomp;
> 8 /^(\w+)\s+=\s+\"(.*)\"/;
> 9 $$1 = $2;
> 10 }
> 11 close(FP);
> 12 print ": $James\n";
>
> the only error message is that this code produces is that "$James" might to a
> typo because it appears only once in the code. fair enough. so i uncomment
> line 3. NOW the error message is that $James is uninitialized.
>
> i don't completely grok scoping in perl, but this seems ridiculous. why would
> perl complain that the variable is uninitialized?
>
> pete
>
> --
> "Coffee... I've conquered the Borg on coffee!" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> -- Kathryn Janeway on the virtues of coffee www.dirac.org/p
