Here's a trick that will save a level in your HoHoA. Use slurp mode to read the whole contents of each file into a string, and save the whole string in the HoH. When you get to the point of needing to interate over the lines, split the string on newlines.

sub readFile {
   my $filename = shift;
   my $fh = new FileHandle("<" . $filename);
   local $/ = undef;  # slurp mode
   my $data = <$fh>;
   $fh->close; 
   return $data;
}
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