Bash: How to persist and restore associative arrays with keys that contain square brackets or other special characters

Problem

Sourcing the result of declare -p for a valid Bash associative array in which keys contain square brackets results in a bad array subscript error.

Testing Procedure

Do:

$ declare -A array
$ key='var[0]'
$ array["$key"]=37
$ echo ${array["$key"]}
37
$ declare -p array > def.sh
$ cat def.sh
declare -A array='(["var[0]"]="37" )'
$ . def.sh
bash: [var[0]]=37: bad array subscript

In the above code, note:

• I am able to specify a key that contains square brackets: var[0]
• The key is quoted for setters and getters
• I am able to do an assignment using this key
• I am able to get the value from the associative array using this key
• Using declare -p I am able to save this definition to a file: def.sh
• When sourcing the file def.sh an error is emitted.

My Environment

• The version of Bash I'm using is 4.2.46(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu).
• I am on a CentOS 7.3.1611 (Core) server

Workarounds

If instead of doing declare -p array > def.sh I do instead:

{
echo 'declare -A array'
for Key in "${!array[@]}"; do
   EscapedKey="$(sed 's|"|\\"|g' <<<"$Key")"
   echo "array[\"$EscapedKey\"]=${array["$Key"]}"
done
} > def.sh

then sourcing the def.sh file works. Note that in the above example, I'm also escaping quote characters that might be a part of the key. I do understand that what I have above is not exhaustive. Because of these complications, I would prefer a solution that doesn't involve such workarounds, if at all possible.

Question

Is there some shopt,set -o <option>, or something else I can do to enable me to persist an associative array whose keys may contain square brackets or other special characters to a file and to later be able to source that file successfully? I am needing a solution that works in my environment above.