After some thought, I came up with this not recursive but iterative version, which seems to work... It uses the m//gc and \G regex functionality to walk through the source string... I like this solution, and it should be easily adjusted to use any delimeter...
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
($\,$,)=("\n","\t");
use Data::Dumper;
my $string =
'({ 1, 2, "three", 0, ({ "internal", "array", 0, }) "end", })';
my @array = parse($string);
print Dumper \@array;
sub parse {
my $source = shift;
my @result = ();
my @stack = (\@result);
{
if($source=~/\G[\s,]*/gc) # skip whitespace
{ redo; }
if($source=~/\G\(\{/gc) # start of a new part
{ push @stack,[]; redo; }
my $part;
if($source=~/\G\}\)/gc) # this part is done
{ $part = pop @stack; }
elsif ($source=~/\G"(.*?)"/gc) # quoted string
{ $part = $1 }
elsif ($source=~/\G(\d+)/gc) # unquoted decimal
{ $part=$1; }
elsif (pos($source)==length($source)) # done
{ last; }
else { # something alien
die "I don't get it at '".
substr($source,pos($source))."'"
}
my $target = $stack[$#stack]; # where to add part
push @{$target},$part; # add it!
redo;
}
return @result;
}
Update: JamesNC is da man... And I have thick fingers
