Parsing of blocks (e.g. foo { bar })

From: Tor Houghton (torh+news_at_removethisbitbeforethedot.bogus.net)
Date: 10/30/03 

Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 12:36:39 +0000

Hi,

I'm wondering if there is a more elegant way of parsing "blocks" of data.

I have a configuration file, thus:

   # comment
   
   some.host.name {
      ; another comment
      /etc/hostname.fxp0
      /etc/hosts
      /etc/mail
   }

And I currently parse this using the following code:

    while(<CONF>) {
       next if(/^\s*(\#|;)|^\s*$/);
       if(m#(\S+)\s+{# .. m#}#) {
          $HOST=$1 if $1;
          if(!/\{|\}/) {
             print "add: $HOST ",$_;
          }
       }
    }

Before I go "all out" and complete this section of the code using the
above technique, I was wondering if there was other (better) ways of doing
this (for one, I'm not sure how to catch out any errors in the file, for
instance:

    some.host.here {
       another.host {
          /usr
          /opt
       }
       /etc
       /var/mail
    }

.. here the current code fails miserably. Mind you, I'm probably the only
one going to use this, so that may not be such a big deal :-> )

Thanks!

Tor

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