How to Write to a Perl Variable as if It’s a Filehandle

This is really cool. I just learned this: you can treat a Perl variable just like a filehandle (read, write, etc).

my $buffer = "";
open my $fh, ">", \$buffer or die $OS_ERROR;
print $fh "hello, world\n";

Now $buffer contains “hello, world\n”. You can do the same kinds of things when reading from a variable.

I knew you could do it with IO::Scalar, but while refreshing my memory on that, I stumbled upon this—who needs IO::Scalar anymore?

This is going to make a lot of tests in Maatkit easier to write.