it tells me that 'key' is a ref to an array

I see. Ok, I will check MLDBM.

Indeed, that print statement did not explicitly tell me it was a ref to an array, technically, but I would then like to call it... "ref at first sight" :)

Well, thank you for your quick reply.




"2b"||!"2b";$$_="the question"
Besides that, my code is untested unless stated otherwise.
*One more: please review the article about regular expressions (do's and don'ts) I'm working on.

MLDBM and SDBM_File is a dangerous combination because the former creates long values out of nested data structure and the latter truncates those, resulting in data loss.

In this situation I'd recommend a safer solution. Like DBM::Deep.

If all what you want is to share data between scripts, Storable is also a candidator. The following scripts show that Storable handles the data type you have: (your data is frozen by an UDP client, sending to an UDP server, and the server thaw it, still get the same thing.)

Client:
use Storable qw(freeze);
use IO::Socket;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $c = new IO::Socket::INET(Proto => "udp",
                                  PeerAddr => "localhost",
                                  PeerPort => 3000,
                                  Timeout => 1);

print "Connected\n";
my $h = {"key" => [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]};
my $arr_freezed = freeze($h);
$c->send($arr_freezed);
close $c;

Server:
use IO::Socket;
use Storable qw(thaw);
use Data::Dumper;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $server = new IO::Socket::INET(Timeout => 7200,
                                 Proto => "udp",
                                  LocalPort => 3000,
                                  LocalHost => "localhost");
print "Server is listening ...\n";
my $arr_freezed;
$server->recv($arr_freezed, 1000);
my $h = thaw($arr_freezed);
print Dumper($h);
close $server;
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