Hello perlisok, and welcome to the Monastery!

In these lines:

    my $fields;
    eval $_;
    die if $@;

    my ( $name, $location, $mapref, $type, $description ) = @$fields;

[download]

you create an empty variable $fields, then you set the values of $name, $location, etc., in the eval, but then you overwrite them in the very next line. This treats $fields as an array reference, but since $fields is still empty, dereferencing it as an array produces an empty list, and the 5 variables lose the values they were assigned in the eval!

Here is the skeleton of a solution:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

$Data::Dumper::Indent = 0;
$Data::Dumper::Useqq  = 1;
$Data::Dumper::Purity = 1;

my ($name, $location, $siteMapRef, $type, $description, $mapRef);

while (<DATA>)
{
    eval $_;
    die if $@;
    my $fields = [ $name, $location, $siteMapRef, $type, $description 
+];
    $_ = Data::Dumper->new( [ $fields ], [ 'fields' ] )->Dump();
    $_ .= "\n";
}
continue
{
    print $_;
}

__DATA__
$name="MyName";$location="MyLoc";$mapRef="MyRef";$type="MyType";$descr
+iption="MyDesc";

[download]

which produces the output:

$fields = ["MyName","MyLoc",undef,"MyType","MyDesc"];

[download]

Update: If you’d had use strict at the start of your script, it would have caught the problem for you. Always begin every script with:

use strict;
use warnings;

[download]

See The strictures, according to Seuss. :-)

Plus minor edits.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

In reply to Re: Cannot update record in file with Dump module by Athanasius
in thread Cannot update record in file with Dump module by perlisok

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