You could serialize your values with one of the CPAN modules for the task, like Storable or FreezeThaw; or use a multilevel DBM astraction like MLDBM. Anyway if your needs are basic you could rather prefer to join different values with a control character, like \cR:

I chose CTRL-R as a mnemonic for Record separator.

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz