Esteemed monks,

given a textual data structure description, I'd like to set up a nested Perl data structure, consisting of hashes and arrays.

The description looks like this: 

    "foo[1].bar.baz[0]", value: 123

[download]
and should be transformed into 
    $data = { 
      foo => [ 
        undef, 
        { bar => 
          { baz => ['123'] 
          } 
        }
      ]
    }

[download]

I've come up with a solution (don't ask how long it took :), but I keep wondering: Doesn't there have to be a better way? Sure, you could modify the description a bit and then eval it, but I don't like using eval.

Here's my clunky code: 

use Data::Dumper;

my $data = str2data('foo[1].bar.baz[0]', 123);
print Dumper($data), "\n";

sub str2data {
    my($string, $value) = @_;

    my $tmp;
    my @idxs = ();

    for my $part (split /\./, $string) {
        if($part =~ /(.*?)\[(.*?)\]/) {
            push @idxs, $1, $2;
        } else {
            push @idxs, $part;
        }
    }
    while(defined(my $idx = pop @idxs)) {
        if($idx =~ /^\d+$/) {
            $tmp = [];
            $tmp->[$idx] = $value;
            $value = $tmp;
        } else {
            $tmp = {};
            $tmp->{$idx} = $value;
            $value = $tmp;
        }
    }

    return $value;
}

[download]

Can you do better?

In reply to Construct a data structure from a string by saintmike

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