Storing variables dynamically in Perl - perl

Question

I am trying to store and print variables dynamically in Perl, by asking user to input number of variables to create, then asking for each of the created variables to add information then output the length of text contained in each of them. In my head I came up with this:
use strict;
use warnings;
sub main {
my %VarStore = ();
print ("How many variables to create: ");
chomp(my $varNum = <STDIN>);
my $counter = 1
while ($counter <= $varNum) {
print "Enter text to variable $counter: \n";
chomp(my $buffer = <STDIN>);
$VarStore{'var'$counter} = $buffer;
$counter ++;
}
while ($counter <= $varNum) {
print "Variable $counter is length($VarStore{'var'$counter}) character long \n";
$counter ++;
}
}
What I would like is:
> How many variables to create: 3
> Enter text to variable 1: ABCQWEPOL
> Enter text to variable 2: xJSAG!HHKSKASK
> Enter text to variable 3: KakA
> Variable 1 is 9 character long
> Variable 2 is 14 character long
> Variable 3 is 4 character long
Any clue why my code is not working? I thought of a hash here so that I can create dynamic variables say with keys var1, var2, var3, etc depending on the input the user gives to create them. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You are correct that a hash is a good solution to this problem. You have two problems in your code. First, $VarStore{'var'$counter} is not valid syntax, you need to use the . operator to concatenate strings $VarStore{'var'.$counter}, or you can use double quotes to interpolate variables into strings $VarStore{"var$counter"}.
Unlike variables, you can't directly interpolate function calls into strings, so the length() call should be done separately. Or alternatively you can concatenate strings with the function call. print "Variable $counter is " . length($VarStore{"var$counter"}). " long\n";
Second problem is that after your first while loop completes, the $counter variable you reuse for the next while loop will already be greater than $varNum, so you need to reset it to 1. $counter = 1;
It may be simpler to use foreach loops to iterate through the count. Also, sub main is not needed but if you use it you need to actually call main(); somewhere so it will run.
use strict;
use warnings;
my %VarStore;
print ("How many variables to create: ");
chomp(my $varNum = <STDIN>);
foreach my $counter (1..$varNum) {
print "Enter text to variable $counter: \n";
chomp(my $buffer = <STDIN>);
$VarStore{"var$counter"} = $buffer;
}
foreach my $counter (1..$varNum) {
my $length = length($VarStore{"var$counter"});
print "Variable $counter is $length character long \n";
}