There are plenty of modules that do the job, with FreezeThaw and Storable being the most popular choices (it seems...).

If, for any reason, you need an handcrafted solution, it depends on the data you have. Long time ago I used to serialize hashes using \cF (control-F) as field separator (i.e.: key/value separator) and \cR as record separator (i.e.: separator between key/value couples).

Obviously, this will break if you have binary data.

Ciao!
--bronto

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->make($love) ;
}