Hi,

have a look at perldoc do.

my $ref = do 'data.txt';
my @array = @$ref;
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McA

Thank you so much. Man, I know that this was so simple and I really appreciate the perldoc reference. :-)

The JSON spec allows anonymous arrays at the top level.:

s$ perl -MData::Dumper -MJSON::Tiny=j -E 'say Dumper j(q{["snow","whit
+e","1212whatever"]})'
$VAR1 = [
          'snow',
          'white',
          '1212whatever'
        ];
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But your data is saved as the output from Data::Dumper, and the "$VAR1 =" portion isn't JSON. If you can't change your storage format, you will probably need to revive that with eval.

Check out the documentation for Data::Dumper.

G'day sherab,

I see ++McA has provided a solution for reconstructing the data stored by (I presume) Data::Dumper.

If the creation of 'data.txt' is also under your control, you might condsider the built-in module Storable. Here's an example usage:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

use Storable;

my $file = './data.txt';
my @original_array = ('Snow', 'White', '1313 Mockingbird Lane');

store \@original_array => $file;

my @retrieved_array = @{retrieve($file)};

print for @retrieved_array;
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Output:

Snow
White
1313 Mockingbird Lane
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The "simple" answer is eval, but there are a lot of caveats with that approach so be sure that you are aware of them. It would probably be better if you could amend the script which creates the data file in the first place. Good luck, anyway.