On the face of it what you want to do is trivial. Consider the following:

use strict;
use warnings;

package Parser;

sub new {
    my ($class, %params) = @_;
    return bless \%params, $class;
}

sub parse {
    my ($self, $inFile) = @_;

    while (<$inFile>) {
        chomp;
        my ($var, $value) = split;

        $self->{$var} = $value;
    }
}

sub getVar {
    my ($self, $varName) = @_;
    return $self->haveVar ($varName) ? $self->{$varName} : undef;
}

sub haveVar {
    my ($self, $varName) = @_;
    return exists $self->{$varName};
}


package main;

my $parser = Parser->new ();
$parser->parse (*DATA);
print "var1 = ", $parser->getVar ('var1') if $parser->haveVar ('var1')
+;

__DATA__
var1 wibble
var2 plonk
var4 dibbly
[download]

Prints:

var1 = wibble
[download]

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