thank you all for your help-- Broquaint -- I am using the 'do' command as you suggested, but when I try to retrieve a value, it comes out empty. I think the problems is that is doesn't recongnise the %dict hash. I tried using %VAR and it didn't work either.

Any suggestions?

## testing to see if the 'do' command worked:

my $dict = do "a.pl" or die "could not load for reading: $!, $@";

my $test = $VAR{anode}{def};

print "test: $test\n";

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--------------------------------------

I am without my perl books (I'm not in the US right now) and I can't seem to find any good example of creating a hash, 'dumping' it to a file and then reading the hash in a completely separate program and accessing the values of the original hash.

I've found tons of examples of creating hashes and dumping them (and i was successfully able to do it) -- but I'm having so much trouble using it in a different program. What's the point of dumping all this data to a file if I can't use it quickly and efficiently in a different program?(!)

In my first program I created a hash and wrote it to a file (see below) -- it successfully writes the hash to a file. Can someone help me 'load' this data into a completely different program?

Also, I am creating one file for each letter of the alphabet, but when I load the data in my new program I would like the entire alphabet to be loaded as one hash. Is this possible?: 

###########################

use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Purity = 1;

my @alph = ('a'..'z');
my $hw;
my $def;
my $pos;


for ($a=0; $a < 1; $a++)           ## only doing one letter
                                   ## until we get dumper 
                                   ## to work properly
#for ($a=0; $a < @alph; $a++)
{
  $cidefile = "cide.".$alph[$a];   ## the file we're reading from
  $newfilename = $alph[$a] . ".pl";

  open(C,$cidefile) || die "\ncould not open $cidefile for reading\n";
  open (N,">$newfilename") || die "could not open $newfilename\n";
  
  @file = <C>;
  close(C);

     for ($i=0; $i < @file; $i++)
     {
        if ($file[$i] =~ /<hw>(.+?)<\/hw>/)
        {
          $hw = lc($1);
          $hw =~ s/\*|\"|\'|\`//gi;
                if ($file[$i] =~ /<def>(.+?)<\/def>/)
                {
                  $def = $1;
                  $def =~ s/<.*?>//g;
                }
                if ($file[$i] =~ /<pos>(.+?)<\/pos>/)
                {
               {
                  $pos = $1;
                }
               ## save the part of speech and the definition
                $dict{$hw}{pos} = $pos;
                $dict{$hw}{def} = $def;
        }
      }
        print N Data::Dumper->Dump([%dict],['dict']);
        close(N);
}

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In reply to Data Dumper Examples by cranberry13

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