I played around with RecDescent a bit last night after posting. I think for the types of things I'm trying to express it may be more than I need (though it will definately do it) I have pretty strict control over how these things get added (adding clauses via a web form) so I don't need to deal with the vaugeries of human typed input. I came up with this which appears to be working for me. Just a fragment that's going to be inserted into a larger bit of code, no error handling/strict etc. Just a poc at this point.
#!/usr/bin/perl + + use Data::Dumper; my $clauses; push(@$clauses, ["==","a","b"]); push(@$clauses, "and"); push(@$clauses, ["==","c","d"]); push(@$clauses, "or"); push(@$clauses, ["==","e","f"]); push(@$clauses, "and"); push(@$clauses, ["==","g","h"]); $Data::Dumper::Indent = 0; + + my $list = BuildList($clauses); print Dumper($list). "\n"; sub BuildList($) { my $clauses = shift(); my $list; while(my $clause = shift(@$clauses)) { if($clause eq "and") { $list = ['AND',[$list], [shift(@$clauses)]]; } elsif($clause eq "or") { $list = ["OR",[$list, BuildList($clauses)]]; } else { $list = $clause } } return($list); }
This gives me
['OR',[['AND',[['==','a','b']],[['==','c','d']]],['AND',[['==','e','f' +]],[['==','g','h']]]]]
Thanks for all the input.
Update: It's also important to note, that I don't really care about what's in each clause. The clauses are going to be pretty tightly controlled by the creation mechanisim.

In reply to Re: Re: prefix notation in an array by amw1
in thread prefix notation in an array by amw1

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.