Use a JSON parser, I found the answer! stupid me.
Here is a more complete answer, in perl of course since I am a pathological extended rubbish lister fan.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# from file content
use JSON;
use Data::Dumper;
open( my $fh, '<', 'json.data' );
$json_text = <$fh>;
$perl_scalar = decode_json( $json_text );
print Dumper $perl_scalar;