Re: Reading an arbitrary hierarchy into a hash tree

[runrig]

Just for the fun of it, here's a way which translates your text into XML, then uses XML::Simple on the result:

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple;

my $str = do { local $/=undef; <DATA> };
LOOP: {
    for ($str) {
     # Make start/end tags for current level
     s#^(\w+)(.*?)(?=^[\w<]|\Z)#<$1>$2\n</$1>\n#smg;
     # Process next level
     s/^\t//mg or last LOOP;
    }
    redo LOOP;
}
my $xs = XML::Simple->new(suppressempty=>'');
# Add root element
my $href = $xs->XMLin("<root>$str</root>");
print Dumper($href);

__DATA__
abc
    def
    ghi
        jkl
mno
    pqr