If you want to extract integers from a string, one way is to use regular expressions (perlre):

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $str = '"[1,2]"';
my @nums = $str =~ /(\d+)/g;
print Dumper(\@nums);

__END__

$VAR1 = [
          '1',
          '2'
        ];
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See also:

• perlintro
• perlretut
• Perl Idioms Explained - @ary = $str =~ m/(stuff)/g