http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=473605


in reply to Parsing a macro language

My initial reaction would be that pagination is a secondary concern, and that the list of questions is the root of the matter, so I'd start with an array of hashes -- or, if the index-naming of the questions is "non-linear" or "semantic" in some way (i.e. not just an ordered list, but a set of distinctly named entities), then make it a hash of hashes.

In any case, the "outermost, primary" unit of organization is the "question", and features of each question are simply:

so the structure could be:

my @questions = [ { page => 'p1', idstr => '4B', label => "... ice cream?", answertype => 'single', answerset => { 1 => 'yes', 2 => 'no' } } ... ]; # or ... my %questions = { '4B' => { page => 'p1', label => '... ice cream?', ... } '4C' => { page => 'p1', label => '... whipped cream?', ... } ... };
As for parsing the input text to fill that structure, there are numerous ways, and Parse::RecDescent would certainly do it (but it might be overkill -- other ways would suffice and be easier if you're really green with P::RD).