If you are referring to the transmission of Perl data structures such as arrays and hashes, you may find some worth in the Storable module which allows such data structures to be serialised into a 'flat' form for such transmission. Alternatives to this module include Data::Dumper and FreezeThaw.

If you are referring to a plain block of information, it may be worth looking at encapsulating such data into a discrete format which can be recognised at the other end of the socket and unpacked accordingly. A simple example of such a format would be uuencoding often used in mail transmission where the encoded data is transmitted between header BEGIN and trailer END lines of text.

perl -le 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000001000011010"))'

#c:/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::Dumper;

my $dumpobj = new XML::Dumper;

my $hashref_send = [
    {
        fname        => 'Fred',
        lname        => 'Flintstone',
        residence    => 'Bedrock'
    },
    {
        fname        => 'Barney',
        lname        => 'Rubble',
        residence    => 'Bedrock'
    }
 ];

# convert to XML string for sending
my $xml_msg = $dumpobj->pl2xml( $hashref_send );

# or Dump to a file for debugging
my $file = "dump.xml";
$dumpobj->pl2xml( $hashref_send, $file );

# Convert received XML back to hash
my $hashref_rec = $dumpobj->xml2pl( $xml_msg );

# Check the result
use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper($hashref_rec);
print $$hashref_rec[0]{'fname'};
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Soap::Lite is very nice to use, it takes virtually no effort to program a client/server system (i.e. just some ten lines of code if both client and server are implemented in Perl.

Apart from receiving data structures as result from remote methods, you can even operate on remote data structures from the client as if they were local, the only difference being a few lines of code to indicate that they're remote objects.

Below you'll find a Node class (to build a tree with) and a SOAP client and server script to demonstrate this.

Just my 2 cents, -gjb-