Perl eval Data::Dumper inconsistency

Question

I have to serialize and deserialize in Perl. I am aware that Data::Dumper and eval are not the best suited ones for this job but I am not allowed to modify this aspect in the legacy scripts which I am working on.
Below are two ways ( CODE 1 and CODE 2 ) to use eval.
In CODE 1, the hash is available as a string before being deserialized via eval.
In CODE 2, the hash is serialized using Dumper before being deserialized via eval.

In both the code samples, one of two attempted ways to deserialize works. Why does the other way to deserialize not work ?

CODE 1

my $r2 = "( 
'w' => {
           'k2' => 5,
           'k1' => 'key',
           'k3' => [
                     'a',
                     'b',
                     2,
                     '3'
                   ]
         },
  'q' => 2 
)"; 

my %z; 
eval "\%z = $r2";          ####### Works. 
print "\%z = [".Data::Dumper::Dumper (\%z)."] "; 

my $answer = eval "$r2";   #### Does NOT work. 
print "\n\nEvaled = [".Dumper($answer)."] "; 

Output

%z = [$VAR1 = {
          'w' => {
                   'k2' => 5,
                   'k1' => 'key',
                   'k3' => [
                             'a',
                             'b',
                             2,
                             '3'
                           ]
                 },
          'q' => 2
        };
]

Evaled = [$VAR1 = 2;
]

But below code works in reverse manner :
CODE 2

my %a = ( "q" =>2, "w"=>{ "k1"=>"key", "k2"=>5, k3=>["a", "b", 2, "3",], }, );  **# Same hash as above example.** 
$Data::Dumper::Terse=1; 
$Data::Dumper::Purity = 1; 
my $r2 = Dumper(\%a); 

my %z; 
eval '\%z = $r2'; 
print "\n\n\%z = [".Dumper(\%z)."] ";         #### Does NOT work. 

my $answer = eval $r2; 
print "\n\nEvaled = [".Dumper($answer)."] ";  ####### Works.

Output

%z = [$VAR1 = {};
]

Evaled = [$VAR1 = {
          'w' => {
                   'k2' => 5,
                   'k1' => 'key',
                   'k3' => [
                             'a',
                             'b',
                             2,
                             '3'
                           ]
                 },
          'q' => 2
        };
]

Answer 1

First of all, please don't put comments that result in syntax errors (**).

Notice that the string you provided in the first code block produces different data structure than the Dumper function. In the first block you are creating a hash, but you don't assign it to any variable. In case of the Dumper function, anonymous hash is created and it's reference is passed to the $VAR variable.

To make the first code work, you should replace ( with { to create anonymous hash and then assign it to a variable, for example:

my $r2 = "$VAR = { 
    'w' => {
           'k2' => 5,
           'k1' => 'key',
           'k3' => [
                     'a',
                     'b',
                     2,
                     '3'
                   ]
         },
  'q' => 2 
}";