That's why I said that any separating characters could be used, meaning that ones that didn't clash could be picked. As a Perl program would most likely be used to convert the existing hashes, characters not normally directly accessible on the keyboard (above ASCII 127) could be used.

The original poster also stated that speed wasn't an issue.

It wouldn't be practical for every application, but might work in this instance. A similar method was used by several text adventure games on machines with limited memory or no array facilities.