That appears to be a filehandle reference, not a regular string. I actually tried initially to use YAML strings, and with YAML::Syck was able to get a prototype working by opening a string reference as a filehandle, then loaded with YAML::Syck::LoadFile($fh) . That was the only YAML parser that worked like that, and when I tried the same thing within Movable Type, it wouldn't read the filehandle. "No such file or directory -type errors. So I gave up.

It looked simple, but I'm missing some key concept.

Maybe parsing CSV is easier. I'll give it a try.