I agree will all the previous posters, and I would also like to point out how painful it can be to handle in place editing (when record size changes) and concurrent access on text files. If you're using text files for intranet purposes, you've most likely already bumped into concurrent access problems.

For the time being, it could be worth using an abstraction layer such as DBD::CSV, or rolling your own. Anyway, I'd consider seriously switch to MLDBM or (better, in my opinion, being the Web involved) a proper database.

Data format conversion is not a concern, as you can write a Perl script that handles that :-)

Happy storing!

-- TMTOWTDI