If you happen to change your data format into XML of some sort, you could use XML::Simple to load the data into a hash reference. It's very nice and easy and does a good job.

Another option would be to get an in-memory representation of the object (which I realize is part of the problem :), then use Data::Dumper to serialize it to disk.

I realize that these don't help you with the data file format that you have, but in case you're investigating other options, these are two good ones.