[Templates] Accessing variables which contain period or dot in the name

[Tosh Cooey]

Hi, this has been bugging me for a bit so I decided to waste some time 
on it and see what I could come up with.

The basic premise is that you pass the template a variable such as:

VARIABLES = {
	'C.I.A' => ['American', 'Dirty'],
	'MI6'   => ['British', '007'],
	'F.S.B' => ['Russian', 'K.G.B.'] }

I believe that this is illegal variable naming, at least based upon 
reading Template Toolkit::Manual::Variables.

So of course you *might* expect it to work like this:

[% FOREACH secret = ['C.I.A' 'MI6', 'F.S.B.'] %]
	[% FOREACH keyword = $secret %]
		[% keyword %]
	[% END %]
[% END %]

But it doesn't.

However what's REALLY STRANGE is how you *can* make this work, which is 
like this:

[% FOREACH secret = ['C.I.A' 'MI6', 'F.S.B.'] %]
	[% FOREACH position = [0 .. $secret.max] %]
		[% $secret.$position %]
	[% END %]
[% END %]

Which means that in the above context the variables with a period or dot 
can be accessed but in the previous context they can't.

Just thought this might be helpful for anyone who had the same problem I 
had, and might also be interesting to know why it's like this.

Tosh

-- 
McIntosh Cooey - Twelve Hundred Group LLC - http://www.1200group.com/