You'd have to do a bit of string parsing yourself; print_r() was meant for debugging, not archival or transactional purposes. If you'd used var_dump() you'd have had an easier time of it, but you'd still have been better off storing something more machine-readable (or more human-readable, being in an email).
That said, the main thing that would need to be done with the output of print_r() would be to replace [foo] with 'foo', and then quote the array values as well (except for any that are themselves arrays, of course). Then put an $array = in front of it and a ; on the end. I think that would make for legitimate PHP code that can be eval()ed.
