And I guess I just don't understand your question. Do you have Perl constructs in your input that you're trying to place into a hash? Something like this might work in that situation:

my %data;
while (<DATA>) {
   my ($key, $value) = eval $_ or die;
   $data{$key} = $value;
}

print $data{other_key}->[1];    # data

__DATA__
some_key  => { data => 'structure', number => 1 }
other_key => [ qw/ other data structure / ]
third_key => "and a simple third"
[download]

Is this what you're getting at? If not, I need to see something more specific.