Agh! the gotcha here is there are some lines with 2 key value pairs on em :(

Yes, sorry, I should have expanded on the data. Especially the noise either side of the data. Hence the indexing step. Below is a data example closer to a true example.

__DATA__
NOISE
noise

Graq
121212
rubbish: values
Graq


Agnostic
Number: 634321
age: 27 hair colour: black
height: 73
weight: 123
legs: 2 arms: 2
balls: 1
aminals: 3
leftandright

rugby
cute

"more noise here - and don't forget the blank lines..."
__END_DATA__
[download]

The first guaranteed unique identifer is the line begining with Number (ie /^Number:/).

Lines before the colon (:) seperated set of values are key-less (hard coded keys must be used), values after are sub-values of the preceding : values.

So, if you like, {arms}->{2}->{leftandright}, {balls}->{1}->{rugby} ..

Is it becoming any clearer?? :-(

<a href="http://www.graq.co.uk">Graq</a>