You'll be best off using a special kind of an array called a hash. perldata has more details.

The difference is that instead of using numbers to get at elements of the array, you use text. Suppose you had a file like the following:

location=dungeon
name=corwin
weapon=grayswandir
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You might read it in and put it in the hash as in this snippet:

my %data = ();    # initialize hash
while (<INPUT>) {    # assume you have the file open already
    my ($key, $value) = split(/=/, $_, 2);
    $data{$key} = $value;
}
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You'll end up with $data{name} set to 'corwin' and so forth.

Update: If you want to keep an actual array around, you can put a reference in a hash. See perlref and perldsc for more details:

$data{$arrname} = \@array;
    # or
$data{$arrname} = [ @array ];
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or some such nonsense.