I wrote a parser for an old kicad brd file a while back that reads all the file contents into a hash so I can make what ever mods to the file that my mind sees fit. Recently, the Kicad maintainers moved to a new format that is compartmentalized with parentheses. The content is basically the same, but the format is a total change. I've just started to think about the best way to parse the file into the same hash structures so the data manipulation on the backend doesn't need to change too much. In an ideal world this is what I would like to happen:

File foo.kicad_pcb:

(
  (SECTION (Section_KEY Value1)
    (Another_KEY1 Value2) (KEY2 value3)
    (KEY3 Value4))
  (NEW_SECTION
    (SUB_SECTION
      (KEY4 Value5))
    (NEW_SUB_SECTION (KEY5 Value6)
    )
  )
)
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Perl Hash would look like this:

open ( BRD, "<foo.kicad_pcb") or die("ha ha");
while (<BRD>)
{
  my $new_line = $_;
  chomp;
  // magic happens here where a has get filled in like this
  $DATA_HASH{SECTION}{Section_KEY} = Value1;
  $DATA_HASH{SECTION}{Another_KEY1} = Value2;
  $DATA_HASH{SECTION}{KEY2} = Value3;
  $DATA_HASH{SECTION}{KEY3} = Value4;
  $DATA_HASH{NEW_SECTION}{SUB_SECTION}{KEY4} = Value5;
  $DATA_HASH{NEW_SECTION}{NEW_SUB_SECTION}{KEY5} = Value6;
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I've looked at a perl module called Text::Balanced but can't seem to make it do what I need (I think my brain stopped working about an hour ago). Anyway, I'm reaching out to see if someone might be able to point me in a better direction. It just seems like there should be an elegant way to do this with out counting parentheses and tracking every thing... aka not the way I would do it in C...