You are absolutely correct, except the OP stated that they used Data::Dumper to convert their hash into a scalar to store it in a database record, and then wanted to turn the scalar back into the hash. It does not appear that the OP wanted to see or manipulate the data beyond converting to and from a database back-end. For this purpose, using FreezeThaw would be a better choice rather than hand rolling your own solution.

Thank you for your comment though! More points of view are always helpful.