Making data 'safe' for writing to a flat file?

The search function is throwing a 500 error, so apologies if this is covered elsewhere.

I'm writing a small file that holds some user data and I want to ensure that I encode it so that I can read it back reliably.

A few pieces of data could contain ANY character that could be stored in a Perl string. Also, some of these strings could be very long.

Some example items that I would write to a file:

Have you looked at the encoding module?

http://perldoc.perl.org/Encode.html

As you are storing personal information in a text file, it will also enable obfuscation!

Edit-> taken from the CPAN docs
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Encoding via PerlIO

If your perl supports PerlIO (which is the default), you can use a PerlIO layer to decode and encode directly via a filehandle.

I would look at the functionality of the Storable module or the pack/unpack function.