Use a Perl's Data::Dumper format array in PHP

Question

I need to access an array which is outputted by Perl's Data::Dumper.
Array is in a raw file, and I need to access it with php.
Array is formatted as this:

$stats = {
  'days' => 25,
  'lengths' => {
    'Piwee' => 269,
    'Jeanne-' => 904,
    'kaAnar' => 340,
[... Very Big ARRAY....]

I found this solution on here, but I don't want to use eval() because this array will have user-input data. Since I will always need to eval() output in case of a str_replace solution, I think I need to find another way to do it.
Maybe convert to XML or by direct PHP parsing?
I'm not sure about what would be the best solution here.

A perl / PHP / bash solution would be okay

note 1: I can't edit the Perl code that output this raw file
note 2: I don't code in Perl so I don't know how to work with such data

Answer 1

Don't use Data::Dumper to export your data. It's primarily for debugging purposes, not for data serialisation, and especially not for input to an alien language

Use the Perl JSON module's encode_json call to create a JSON string from the Perl hash, and PHP's json_decode to convert it into a PHP associative array

For instance, say your output from Data::Dumper is in file stats.data, then a short Perl program like this will print the JSON equivalent to STDOUT

use strict;
use warnings 'all';

use JSON;

print encode_json( do 'stats.data' or die $! ), "\n";

output

{"lengths":{"Jeanne-":904,"Piwee":269,"kaAnar":340},"days":25}