You can do it that way, but I suggest that you separate actual variable assignments from your data file, and instead just have a complex data structure.

# data.pl
(
    act => {
        "food"  => "eat it",
        "drink" => "drink it",
        "Perl"  => "play it",
    },
    act1 => {
        "foo"   => "bar",
        "baz"   => "biz",
    },
);
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Then in your code, you can iterate on keys instead of this hardcoded list.

my %hash = do 'data.pl';

my $item = "Perl";
my $out = grep {-p $_->{$item}} values %hash ? 1 : 0;
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Or something to that effect.

- Miller