If you have some data you don't want to be readily readable in Perl you can obfuscate it with the unpack function. You can take a given string and encode it as printable hex and store that, and later unpack it for use in the real world.

perl -E 'print unpack("H*", "I love Perl!") . "\n"'

perl -E 'print pack("H*", "49206c6f7665205065726c21") . "\n"'