This is the resulting string shortened (as printed out by perl)

I think you rather mean "as (would be) printed out by Perl's Data::Dumper", In which case it is nearly trivial to make that into a perl structure by simply evaluating the string, although you probably want to get rid of $VAR1 there. Since you explicitly write hash rather than em>hashref, you may want change the outermost curlies into parens as well.

PS: I always say "beware of (string) evals, but this is a situation in which it would definitely be useful. The usual caveat does apply, though.