use 5.008000;  # Requires Perl 5.8.0 or higher

my $var = '';

open(my $fh, '>', \$var)
   or die("Unable to open mem file: $!");

print $fh 'moo!';

print(length($var), "\n");  # Prints '4'.
[download]

In earlier versions, IO::Scalar might do the trick.

Thank you for the reply..........I'm pretty green at this. I'm not quite sure which parts of your reply I am to substitute my own names, or files for (i.e. $fh 'moo!', etc.). Could you clarify? Which parts of your code other than the variable name, would I change?

use if $] < 5.008, 'IO::Scalar';
                 # IO::Scalar is needed in pre-5.8 Perl

my $var = '';    # this is the variable we will be writing to or readi
+ng from

my $fh;          # this is a filehandle, reads and writes will go to $
+var
if ($] < 5.008) {$fh = new IO::Scalar \$var}
else            {open $fh, '+<',      \$var}
$fh or die "can't get filehandle for \$var: $!";

print $fh "These print statements will\n";
print $fh "be appended to \$var.\n";

seek $fh, 0, 0;  # reading and writing <$fh> will seek in $var.
my $var1 = <$fh>;
my $var2 = <$fh>;

print $var1;     # print "These print statements will\n"
print $var2;     # print "be appended to \$var.\n"
[download]

If I understood your original question correctly, you wanted a file handle which wrote to a variable instead of to a file.

$fh is the file handle.
$var is the variable in which the text ends up.
'moo!' is the text being written to $var.