I think replacing this:

$x =~ s/['\s+]//g;
my %hash = split /[:,]/, $x;
[download]

with this:

$x =~ s/'\s*:\s*'/' => '/g;
my %hash = %{ eval "{$x}" };
[download]

would make it less breakable (but still breakable if and keys or values contained something like "' : '").