Grabbing Text from file and assigning them to variables

[want2learnperl]

Perl Newbie here.

I want to open a file that I have setup as a configuration file. After opening the file I was to assign parts of the words to variables.

for example (configuration file config.conf):

cake=yellow,chocolate,red,white
icing=butter,lemon,chocolate
 

I want to open the above file, config.conf, and read it while assiging variables to the items after the equals sign.

my($cake,$icing);
 
$cake = undef;
$icing = undef;
 
open(handle,"config.conf") || die "no file found\n";
foreach $line (<handle>) {
    my( $cake) = $line =~ /^cake=(.*)/;
    my($icing) = $line =~ /^icing=(.*)/;
}
print $cake; #nothing prints
print $icing; #nothing prints
close(handle);
 
#next i would like to split the $cake items by using the split command
#then I would split the $icing items
#tricky part I think is trying to create a directory structure where each cake has
# below it a sub directory for each icing
#I plan on populating taste results under the sub directory
#ex:
 

• /yellow
  
  • /butter
    
  • /lemon
    
  • /chocolate
    
• /white
  
  • /butter
    
  • /lemon
    
  • /chocolate
    

$cake and $icing do not print.

If someone could help with my logic I would appreciate the hlep.

[KevinADC]

you have a scoping problem:

my($cake,$icing );#<-- here you declared with "my"

$cake = undef;
$icing = undef;

open(FH,"config .conf") || die "no file found\n";
while (my $line = <FH>) {
my( $cake) = $line =~ /^cake=(.*)/;#<-- $cake declared again with "my"
my($icing) = $line =~ /^icing=(.*)/;#<-- $icing declared again with "my"
}

just remove the "my" from the variables in the loop and it will work but it will assign the last match in the file to those variables. If there is only one possible match than you will be OK. Note I changed "foreach" to "while" and "filehandle " to "FH". "foreach" will not process a file properly and filehandles should aways be uppercase if you use barewords like FH or FILEHANDLE. This avoids collisions with functions and other things that are barewords.

[miller]

Alternatively, you could use a config module like Config::Tiny.

use Config::Tiny;
 
# Open the config
$config = Config::Tiny->read( 'config.conf' );
 
my $cake = $config->{_}{cake};
my $icing = $config->{_}{icing};
 
print "$cake\n";
print "$icing\n";
 

- Miller