passing variables between PHP and Perl

I'm integrating a telephony service into a clients site. I'm pretty handy with PHP but I don't have much knowledge of perl. I've setup up my client's site using PHP and the service provided me with a Perl script to make the telephone connection. I used virtual() in my PHP script to pass variables to the Perl script but now I need to deal with passing the results from the Perl back to PHP. Is there something like virtual() in Perl that I could use to relay the variables back to my script? Can I call up the Perl variables from my PHP script after virtual()? Any help would be appreciated. Tom