in reply to patern matching whitespace, / and others

For matching the directory paths, you don't want to specify every possible level. You probably want:
(?:/\w*?)+ # /dir or /dir/dir2 or ....
But you probably don't want to use a regex to process the data lines. To get the numbers paired with the right columns, you probably ought to figure out which columns the headers are in, and use unpack() to grab what lines up below them.

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