Evaluating Strings with numerical expressions in Perl

Question

Is there a way in Perl to evaluate expressions in string variables ? I am using Perl 5.8 While parsing files, I came across a string like this :

var_xx = ((216<<23)|34);

I am trying to make a hash table for each variable along with its value. But in such conditions, Its not working. In my perl script I have

$str=((216<<23)|34); (String context)

Is there some function such that

$val = some_func($str);

and $val should now contain the value in $str.

Answer 1

eval will do what you want, but just because you can doesn't mean that you should