larryk, you can read a __DATA__ that is in another file.

Imagine you have a perl module called Store_Config.pm, which has some information in it's __DATA__ tags that you need to read. If you know the namespace that the __DATA__ handle is in, you can do this to read it:

use strict;
use Store_Config;
use Symbol qw(qualify_to_ref);

#Pull the reference to the __DATA__ handle 
my $fh = qualify_to_ref(DATA => 'Store_Config');

#$fh can now be acted on like a file handle

read($fh, my $config, -s $fh);

print "Store_Config.pm's __DATA__ content is: [$config]\n";
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