Just choose a delimiter and split the values after you read them. What delimiter to use depends on the characters allowed in the values, but most of the time comma is good enough. So assuming the INI contains:

[path]
files=foo.txt,bar.txt,baz.csv
[download]

you'd just need to do something like:

@files = split /\s*,\s*/, $config->{path}{files};
 # the \s* removes the optional whitespace around delimiters
[download]

You might do the splitting inside the forValue=> callback, but I think that would just complicate the code. You'd have to specify what values to split, because you'd definitely not want to split everything that contains the delimiter. So I think it's better to split after everything is read.

If you did want to modify the $config structure to contain certain values as arrays you might do something like this:

foreach my $Section (values %$config) {
 # $Section is a hash ref containing the values of the section, not th
+e section name!
  foreach my $value (qw(files colors and other options that should be 
+arrays)) {
    $Section->{$value} = [split /\s*,\s*/, $Section->{$value}];
  }
}
[download]

After this the $config->{anySection}{files} is no longer a string but a reference to an anonymous array containing the individual items.

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