Re: Parsing issue

[vitoco]

Problems detected in this output:

• It is a very special output format. You can recognize keys and values visually, but is hard to find a pattern for automation. You should probably have to write some code to parse each line in order, one at a time.
• If field names (keys) are always the same, another approach should be to search for them and find the corresponding values from the full form.
• Some values are in a different line than the field name as you said in your post.
• Colon ":" alone cannot be used as a delimiter, because it appears in a timestamp. You already know that!
• What is missing in your approach is a pattern to split multi columns lines, like the first one.
• There are multiple words in some keys.

The last point gave me an idea: Let all the words with exactly one space between them just before a colon be a key. So you have to be sure that a value need many spaces after it not to be considered as part of the key from the next line (trick one). Then, also split everywhere there are many spaces and treat them as another delimiter (trick two).

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $string = "";

while(<DATA>) {
    $_ =~ s/\n/  /g; # (trick one)
    $string .= $_;
}

my %hash = split (/\s*:\s+|\s\s+/, $string); # (trick two)

print Dumper( \%hash );

__DATA__
VLAN     : 1           Status     : Enabled
FID      : 1           Name       : DEFAULT VLAN
VLAN Type: Permanent   Last change: 2009-08-31 16:48:45
 Egress Ports:
host.0.1
 Forbidden Egress Ports:
ge.3.39
 Untagged Ports:
host.0.1

Output:

$VAR1 = {
          'Last change' => '2009-08-31 16:48:45',
          'Status' => 'Enabled',
          'Forbidden Egress Ports' => 'ge.3.39',
          'FID' => '1',
          'VLAN' => '1',
          'Untagged Ports' => 'host.0.1',
          'Egress Ports' => 'host.0.1',
          'Name' => 'DEFAULT VLAN',
          'VLAN Type' => 'Permanent'
        };

You were too close, but now you have to be sure that all possible values of 'VLAN Type' should not be so long to left only one space before 'Last change' field.