Clojure's reader is designed to provide the types of tasks useful for Lisps; specifically to take a string and convert it to data structures. However, like most Lisps Clojure has some special syntax that does various tasks at read-time like the #= tag that might not be safe to use as a webform processor, but it's critical to the way that Clojure works.

In Clojure 1.5 there are EDN functions that handle a subset of the Clojure syntax and parse strings into data types like numbers, maps and vectors (and others). It's meant to deal with data only and not "reader forms". I wrote a Ring middleware to handle EDN data and recently ported it to use the new 1.5 EDN reader.

https://github.com/fogus/ring-edn/blob/master/src/ring/middl...

It looks almost exactly like the old clojure.core/read-string except it will not execute any dangerous code.