Assuming (a) the modification proposed by Eliya, and (b) that you placed correctly a comma at the correct places, you end up with a string $s containing the whole content of the file, modified like this: 

"  KEY1 => 'VALUE1', \n   KEY2 => [ 'VALUE21',\n  'VALUE22'\n'VALUE23'
+ ]"

[download]
If you manage to come so far, you can easily get a reference to this hash with 
my $hashref=eval "{${s}}";
if($@) {
  print STDERR "Error in input: $@\n";
} else {
  # Dump the data just read
  print("Key $_ has value ",$hashref->{$_},"\n") for keys %$s;
}

[download]

So perhaps the most tricky part is to get the commas in the right place. To do this, I would first place a comma in front of every /\b(\S+?\s*=>)/, which leaves us one extra comma near the start of the string, which you have to remove afterwards. Well, maybe there is also a simpler solution to this. However, in any case you would make your life easier by forbidding input data similar to 
KEY1 => 'abc THIS_LOOKS_LIKE_A_KEY_BUT_IS_NOT => \'uh-oh\' this might 
+cause trouble'

KEY2 => '.....'

[download]
-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>

In reply to Re^3: Initialize an hash with string by rovf
in thread Initialize an hash with string by Anonymous Monk

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