1000s of rules in 1 (or a few) huge files, or many small files?

If many small to medium files, you could try Text::Balanced to help you extract brace-delimited blocks of text.

If the files are too big read in to memory, you will need to parse them a line at a time. When you encounter a {, push the preceding section name in to an @array, add it to a %hash (as a key) and create another hash to hold the following entries as you parse them. When you encounter a }, pop the most recent name off the @array. As you process key/value pairs, add them to the %hash for the current (sub)section. When done, you will have a hash of hashes of hashes of ..., nested like the config data.

In reply to Re: Parsing a config file with braces and nested braces by RonW
in thread Parsing a config file with braces and nested braces by IamtheGorf

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