I was thinking to read in the entire file, concatenate into one big string, and work on that.. If you want to do it line by line, and each item is on a line by itself (as it appears to be from your example), then you wont need the position bit, just call the function with the filehandle and the current line instead. Thus you get: 
sub parsevcard
{
    my ($fh, $line) = @_;
    my $currentvcard = {};
    # check that $line is really the beginning of a vcard, else die
    # loop reading lines from <$fh> and putting them in $currentvcard,
+ call $currentvcard->{AGENT} = parsevcard($fh, $line) if a BEGIN:VCAR
+D is encountered
    return $currentvcard; # check for end vcard?
}

[download]
.. Actual contents left as an exercise for the reader..

C.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: recursive parsing techniques by castaway
in thread recursive parsing techniques by blahblah

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