Based on LanX' advice Re: Storing/parsing perl data structure in/from a file (YAML), it turns your data into an array of arrays, adding quotes in a simplistic way, and then traverses the resulting structure to turn it into a hash of hashes. It adds underscores to the keys to avoid duplicates. You might want to change that code to add a warning message. 

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $data;
{ local $/; $data = <DATA> }
$data =~ tr/}{/][/;
$data =~ s/\s*(.*?)\s*=>\s*(.*?)\s*,/"$1","$2",/g; # warning: simplist
+ic quoting

my $aref;
eval "\$aref=$data";

sub array2hash {
        my $aref = shift;
        return $aref if "ARRAY" ne ref $aref;
        die "Cannot turn array with odd number of elements into hash.\
+n" if @$aref %2;
        my $href = {};
        for (0..@$aref/2-1) {
                $aref->[2*$_] .= "_" while( exists $href->{$aref->[2*$
+_]} );
                $href->{$aref->[2*$_]} = array2hash( $aref->[2*$_+1] )
+;
        }
        return $href;
}

my $href = array2hash $aref;
print Dumper $href;

__DATA__
{
  alpha => {
    beta => {
      gamma => theta,
      delta => lambda,
    },
    beta => {
      gamma => zeta,
    },
  },
},

[download]

If you want the contents of several files into one hash, I would think the best strategy is to first read the contents of all files into one string, then turn it into array of arrays and then into hash of hashes.

In reply to Re: Storing/parsing perl data structure in/from a file by hdb
in thread Storing/parsing perl data structure in/from a file by Wilderness

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