I'm a big fan of .ini files because they're human readable, and also very machine readable. I wrote a quick function to convert a hashref to a simple .ini string.

my $str = hash_to_ini({ data => { 'name' => 'scott', animal => 'dog' }});

sub hash_to_ini {
    my $x   = $_[0];
    my $ret = '';

    foreach my $key (sort(keys(%$x))) {
        my $val = $x->{$key};

        if (ref($val) eq "HASH") {
            $ret .= "[$key]\n";
            foreach my $k (sort(keys(%$val))) { $ret .= "$k = " . $val->{$k} . "\n"; }
        } else { $ret .= "$key = $val\n" }
    }

    $ret =~ s/\n\[/\n\n[/; # Add a space between sections
    return $ret;
}

I also wrote a version in PHP

function hash_to_ini($x) {
    $ret = '';

    foreach (array_keys($x) as $key) {
        $val = $x[$key];

        if (is_array($val)) {
            $ret .= "[$key]\n";
            foreach (array_keys($val) as $k) { $ret .= "$k = " . $val[$k] . "\n"; }
        } else { $ret .= "$key = $val\n"; }
    }

    $ret = preg_replace("/\n\[/", "\n\n[", $ret);
    return $ret;
}

Note: see also parse_ini()

I wrote a simple .ini parsing function in Perl.

my $hash_ref = parse_ini("/tmp/config.ini");

sub parse_ini {
    open (my $INI, "<", $_[0]) or return undef;

    my $ret     = {};
    my $section = "_";

    while (my $line = readline($INI)) {
        if ($line =~ /^\[(.+?)\]/) { # Section heading
            $section = $1;
        } elsif ($line =~ /^(\w.*?)\s*=\s*"?(.*?)"?\s*$/) { # Key/Value pair
            $ret->{$section}->{$1} = $2;
        }
    }

    return $ret;
}