Instead of trying to split on a character that might accidentally show up in your code, why don't you just serialize a data structure?

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use Storable qw/ freeze thaw /;
    use Data::Dumper;
    
    my %foo = (
        one => [ qw/ a b c / ],
        two => [ qw/ 1 2 3 / ]
    );
    
    my $serialized = freeze \%foo;
    my %clone = %{ thaw $serialized };
    
    print Dumper \%clone;
[download]

It's much cleaner that way and you can store it in your database quite nicely (rethinking the database design is better, though).

Cheers,
Ovid

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