ikegami, thank you for your response. I will try to answer your questions.

I am sorry my code did not work for you. I diffed it against the code on my system and it is working for me. I can offer no explanation for this behavior.

I apologize for not being more forthcoming with my requirements. I had hoped that the example I provided would be enough. This is essentially an “order of operations” problem. The three operations I have are And, Or, and Not. And I basically want to build a tree that will let me handle the terms in order based on the precedence provided by parenthesis with the And and Or at the same level and Not being a little higher. (I know Not is not in my original code, but I was starting small) Take the below generic statement.

(term1) and (term2) and ((term3) or (term4)) and not (term5))

I would like to boil this down into an array I can traverse bottom up getting to the innermost terms first.

So first resolve term3 or term 4

Then resolve the results vs. not term5

Then resolve the results vs term 2 and term 1

I figured traversing a tree structure would be the fastest way to do this but I am open to suggestions.

You said this is your desired output:

$VAR1 = {
           {
             'cvtype=\'problem\''
           }
        {
           and
        }
           {
             problem_description match \'*\'
           }
        };
[download]

Your desired output makes no sense. It doesn't even compile.

syntax error at a.pl line 5, near "{"
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at a.pl line 9.
[download]

Please fix.

---

I would like to boil this down into an array

Really? An array of what? Parsers normally produce trees.

My apologies.

My studies led me to believe that the presentation of a Tree in PERL is actually a Multi-dimensional array. Where the bottom of the tree is actually the furthest out array elements. Kind of turns a tree on it's side. If I am wrong that put's a whole new spin on what I am trying to do.

Thank You

DevM