I have been trying to eval a text file that I previously dumped to file with Data::Dumper. I had no luck until I lifted stricture with a no strict.

Could someone explain this to a very tired monk? I'm sure there is solid logical reason for it, but the diagnostics message wasn't making particularly much sense to me after a full day in front of the screen.

Update: never mind, I see now. Because use strict; doesn't like the undeclared $VAR1 from the file, the assignment fails. I didn't see this earlier but I see this now by adding a print $@ if $@; right after the eval(). Like I said, I'm tired ;-) Thanks to the swift replies that confirmed this (silly) oversight on my part.

Here's (the original) reduced problemset:

use strict;
use diagnostics;
my $h; # hashref
{
    #no strict; # no output until un-commented!!
    local $/;
    my $t=<DATA>;
    $h=eval $t;
}
foreach my $item ( keys %{$h} ) {
    print "$item\n";
}
exit;
__DATA__
$VAR1 = {
          'ITEM1' => {
                         'A' => {
                                     'count' => 4,
                                     'percentage' => '1',
                                     'qty' => 4
                                   }
                       },
          'ITEM2' => {
                         'A' => {
                                     'count' => 15,
                                     'percentage' => '1',
                                     'qty' => 193
                                   }
                       }
    };
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