You are trying to roll your own format and parser for representation of the circuit network. You can take advantage of the plethora of the Graph modules available in CPAN. They might actually help you in finding the connectivity of nodes and other stuff. This is of course if you are building a production worthy system out of this. If this is only for academic learning purposes you can stay with your own format and parser.

Hope this helps.

-T

use perl; use strict;