Including a perl file that is generated in current file - perl

Question

I am working on a perl script that successfully generates output files containing hashes. I want to use those hashes in my file. Is it possible to include a file that is generated in that file or will I have to create another file?
Technically, it might be cleaner to start a new .pl file that uses those hashes, but I would like to keep everything in a single script if possible. Is it even possible to do so?
Edit: I'm just unsure if I can "circle" it back around so I can use those hashes in my file because the hashes are generated on a weekly basis. I don't want my file to mistakenly reach out for last week's hashes instead of the newly generated ones. I have not yet wrote my script in a manner to classify each week's generated hashes.
In summary, here is what my file does. It extracts a table from another file. removes columns and rows that are not needed. Once left with the only two columns needed, it takes them and puts them into a hash. One column being the key and the other being the value. For this reason, I've found Data::Dumper to be the best option for my hashes. I'm intermediate in Perl and this is a script I'm putting together for an internship.

Answer 1

Here is an example how you can save a hash as JSON to a file and later read back the JSON to a perl hash. This example is using JSON::XS:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON::XS;
{
my %h = (a => 1, b => 2);
my $str = encode_json( \%h );
my $fn = 'test.json';
save_json( $fn, \%h );
my $h2 = read_json( $fn );
print Dumper( $h2 );
}
sub read_json {
my ( $fn ) = #_;
open ( my $fh, '<', $fn ) or die "Could not open file '$fn': $!";
my $str = do { local $/; <$fh> };
close $fh;
my $h = decode_json $str;
return $h;
}
sub save_json {
my ( $fn, $hash ) = #_;
my $str = encode_json( $hash );
open ( my $fh, '>', $fn ) or die "Could not open file '$fn': $!";
print $fh $str;
close $fh;
}
Output:
$VAR1 = {
'a' => 1,
'b' => 2
};
Some alternatives to JSON are YAML and Storable.