MIME::Decoder::UU

I'm having trouble understanding the MIME:ecoder usage.

Within the context of a MIME email handling program I have an array, @data,
and I want to uuencode it. I thought I could instantiate a MIME:ecoder
with an encoding of 'x-uuencode' and then call the encode method as,

my $decoder = new MIME:ecoder('x-uuencode');
$decoder->encode(@data, @uudata);

However, the encode method only accepts STREAMs as arguments. Obviously I
could write out the array data to a temporary file, close it, open it for
input, open another temporary output file, call encode with the two
temporary files, close the temporary output file, open it for input, read it
into the uuencoded array, and then clean up the two temporary files.

I'm hoping there is a better way and that someone might share other
approaches with me.

Thanks,
Steve

S Etchelecu