Hi exilepanda,

Only I thought that would be some build in perl func or syntactical trick can do the job. Seem there should be no simple direct way to do that now.

Well sure there is :-)

my $data = {};
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @fields = split /\s*[=\.]\s*/;
    build( $data, \@fields, pop @fields );
}
sub build {
    my ($ref, $path, $val) = @_;
    return $val unless @$path;
    my $el = shift @$path;
    if ($el=~/^\[(\d+)\]$/)
        { $ref->[$1]  = build( $ref->[$1],  $path, $val ) }
    else
        { $ref->{$el} = build( $ref->{$el}, $path, $val ) }
    return $ref;
}

__DATA__
object.prop.subprop.[0].name = foo
object.prop.subprop.[1].name = bar
obj.prop.[0] = blah
obj.prop.[1] = 1000
[download]

$data then looks like so:

{
  obj => { prop => ["blah", 1000] },
  object => { prop => { subprop => [{ name => "foo" }, { name => "bar"
+ }] } },
}
[download]

And then to walk the data structure:

sub dive {
    my ($ref,@path) = @_;
    return $ref unless @path;
    my $el = shift @path;
    if ($el=~/^\[(\d+)\]$/)
        { return dive( $ref->[$1],  @path ) }
    else
        { return dive( $ref->{$el}, @path ) }
}

print dive( $data, qw/ obj prop [0] / ), "\n";   # prints "blah"
print dive( $data, qw/ object prop subprop
    [1] name / ), "\n";                          # prints "bar"
[download]

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D