I think RMGir is on the right track .. instead of trying to parse all of the C in the file, find a regexp (or a grammer) that will *JUST* pull out the defintions of all the large arrays.

His suggestion of /^[A-Z_]+ [a-z_0-9]+ = {/ will probably catch too much (i'm guessing you have plenty of small arrays you aren't worried about) but if there's some "minimum array nest depth" that you are interested in, you can write a regexp to find those... 

$_ = ...; # file contents
my $min_depth = 4;
while (/([A-Z_]+ [a-z_0-9]+ = \{([^\}]*\{){$min_depth,}[^;]*;)/g) {
    my $array = $1;
    ....
}

[download]
(completely untested,of course)

In reply to Re: Maintaining horrible C with Parse::RecDescent by hossman
in thread Maintaining horrible C with Parse::RecDescent by isotope

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