You might consider writing a parser which is just "good enough" for the files you want to process. Since structures seem to end on line boundaries, you can try something like this:
my $root = {};
my @stack;
my $object = $root;
use Data::Dumper;
while (<DATA>) {
if (m{^\s*\/\*}) { next } # assume single line comment
elsif (m/^\s*END(_OBJECT)?/) {
$object = pop(@stack);
} elsif (m/^\s*OBJECT\s*=\s*(\S+)/) {
my $new = { parent => $object, type = $1 };
push(@{$object->{children}}, $new);
push(@stack, $object);
$object = $new;
} elsif (m/^\s*(\w+)\s*=\s*(\S*)/) {
my $property = $1;
my $value = $2;
if ($value =~ m/^"/) {
while ( (($value =~ tr/"//) % 2 != 0) && defined($_ = <DATA>)) {
s/^\s*//;
$value .= $_;
}
}
$object->{$property} = $value;
}
}
print Dumper($root);
The string literal parsing is admittedly a little cheesy since I don't know what the rules are for representing literals in ODL files.