A perl reference is just a fancy pointer. Even if you could recreate the pointer when the .cgi is called again, that to which it was pointing is no longer in memory. What you can do is serialize the hash. There are modules to do that, or here's a simple way to do a hash of strings or an array of strings:

$s = join('|',
   map { local $_=$_; s/\^/^1/g; s/\|/^2/g; $_ }
      %test_hash
);
[download]

And to deserialize:

%test_hash =  map { local $_=$_; s/\^1/^/g; s/\^2/|/g; $_ }
   split(/\|/, $s);
[download]

I didn't use a slashed escape mechanism since it's makes deserialization hard. (i.e. "Should I split on this pipe, or is that an escaped pipe?") Trivia: IP over Serial Line (SLIP) and maybe Point to Point Protocol (PPP) use a similar escaping mechanism to escape packet delimiters since the delimiters cannot appear inside a packet.

---

Update: I had typos originally. Fixed. here's some test code:

use Data::Dumper ();

%test_hash = (
  'apple' => 'red',
  'lime'  => 'green',
  'junk'  => 'foo^bar',
  'junk2' => 'bla|bla',
);

print(Data::Dumper->Dump([ \%test_hash ],[qw( $test_hash_ref )]));
print("\n");

$s = join('|',
   map { local $_=$_; s/\^/^1/g; s/\|/^2/g; $_ }
      %test_hash
);

print($s, "\n");
print("\n");

%test_hash =  map { local $_=$_; s/\^1/^/g; s/\^2/|/g; $_ }
   split(/\|/, $s);

print(Data::Dumper->Dump([ \%test_hash ],[qw( $test_hash_ref )]));

__END__
output
======
$test_hash_ref = {
                   'apple' => 'red',
                   'junk' => 'foo^bar',
                   'junk2' => 'bla|bla',
                   'lime' => 'green'
                 };

apple|red|junk|foo^1bar|junk2|bla^2bla|lime|green

$test_hash_ref = {
                   'apple' => 'red',
                   'junk' => 'foo^bar',
                   'lime' => 'green',
                   'junk2' => 'bla|bla'
                 };
[download]

---

---

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