1. it seems you confused cfgaug with cfgdelta following your own terminology in the OP
  2. you've added more complex and fuzzy requirements by altering arrays:

    [ "--collect" ] becomes [ "--collect", "--brief" ],

  3. you haven't told us at all how to treat arrays ...

    e.g. do they represent sets were the order doesn't matter?

You've been provided with two solutions, Hippo mentioned modules I've sketched an algorithm.

I think it's time for you to wet your feet and come up with an SSCCE plus test suite for this special kind of data.

Unfortunately we are not telepathic, we can't help you with fuzzy requirements of an alien cfg format.

I strongly recommend you implementing the recursive walker (many examples in the archives) which dives into your data and handles scalars, arrays and hashes by type.

Then you play around and handle special edge cases AND semantics, like one array is supposed to be a set, the other one is ordered an so on ...

That way you'll also get at least a validator for your "user supplied" cfg-format.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^4: Augmenting and reducing data structures by LanX
in thread Augmenting and reducing data structures by sciurius

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.