I am not sure what you are trying to achieve here. Do you want to read the entire file into a single string? If so, try the following:

use IO::File;
use strict;

my $f = new IO::File "data", "r" or die "can not open file";
my $data;
{
  local $/;
  $data = <$f>;
}

# at here, $data is your entire data file with embedded \n.
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