Yes it's perfectly legal. Like Foxcub I would slurp the contents like this:

my $fileContents;
open (FILE, $txt_file) || die "Could not open $txt_file - $!\n";
while (<FILE>) { $fileContents .= $_; }
close (FILE);
[download]

NOTE: Make sure that slurping the file into a scalar is really what you want to do. Obviously there's no problem if the file is small(ish). You might run into memory issues if you try slurping large files into memory. Perhaps you could give us some indication on what you plan on doing with the scalar. We could offer some advice as to whether that's the best way to go...

-- vek --