JSON, YAML, INI, TOML, XML... these are all serialization and data interchange formats. JSON, and YAML are particularly lightweight for representing datastructures such as hashes, arrays, and nested structures.

Are you committed due to some immutable legacy technical debt to using Perl files to store your data? Could you possibly adopt a more secure, simpler format such as JSON? JSON is popular because it is simple, and if treated as data (ie, not evaled by a Javascript engine as code) is fairly secure, in that it won't be exposing your code to injected code.

Perl supports JSON and YAML quite easily using modules from CPAN, and since Perl 5.14 JSON is even supported in the Perl core distribution via JSON::PP


Dave

In reply to Re: Reading a hash structure stored in a file by davido
in thread Reading a hash structure stored in a file by sam1990

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