You are heading for disaster by stripping the "'s from "summary". If there are ,'s in the summary, your CSV will be corrupt. Another point is that not all records seem to have the same fields defined. One could do better by being more generic. And finally, use a decent CSV module for output like Text::CSV_XS or Text::CSV.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.014;
use warnings;
use Text::CSV_XS;

my %hdr;
my @dta;
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({ binary => 1, auto_diag => 1, eol => "\r
+\n" });

{   local $/ = "";
    while (<DATA>) {
        my %data = m/^\s*(\w[^ :]+)[: ]+(.*\S)\s*$/gm;
        $hdr{$_}++ for keys %data;
        push @dta, \%data;
        }
    my @hdr = keys %hdr;
    $csv->print (*STDOUT, \@hdr);
    $csv->print (*STDOUT, [ @{$_}{@hdr} ]) for @dta;
    }

__END__
user: myus44 [up] 
------------
 admin-state enabled 
 summary "Johnny Cash" 
 access-level group-defined 
 group mi-group  [up]

user: jar1543 [up] 
------------
 admin-state enabled 
 summary "Lara Croft" 
 access-level group-defined 
 group jar-head  [up]

user: myprivilegeduser [up]
-----------
admin-state enabled
access-level privileged

[download]

will produce:

group,summary,user,access-level,admin-state
"mi-group  [up]","""Johnny Cash""","myus44 [up]",group-defined,enabled
"jar-head  [up]","""Lara Croft""","jar1543 [up]",group-defined,enabled
,,"myprivilegeduser [up]",privileged,enabled

[download]

This way the data is exactly what it was. If you do not want the double quotes, but still be safe:

    while (<DATA>) {
        my %data = m/^\s*(\w[^ :]+)[: ]+(.*\S)\s*$/gm;
        $hdr{$_}++     for keys   %data;
        s/^"(.*)"$/$1/ for values %data;
        push @dta, \%data;
        }

[download]

To produce

group,summary,user,access-level,admin-state
"mi-group  [up]","Johnny Cash","myus44 [up]",group-defined,enabled
"jar-head  [up]","Lara Croft","jar1543 [up]",group-defined,enabled
,,"myprivilegeduser [up]",privileged,enabled

[download]

And finally, if you want the user as first/key field, proceed like

    delete $hdr{user};
    my @hdr = ("user", keys %hdr);

[download]

to get

user,group,summary,access-level,admin-state
"myus44 [up]","mi-group  [up]","Johnny Cash",group-defined,enabled
"jar1543 [up]","jar-head  [up]","Lara Croft",group-defined,enabled
"myprivilegeduser [up]",,,privileged,enabled

[download]

Side note: Text::CSV_XS will have no problems with undefined fields


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

In reply to Re^2: Multi Line Matching- getting into csv by Tux
in thread Multi Line Matching- getting into csv by symgryph

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