Hi

I'm a Perl newbie with the following task: I need to take a very long string and parse the elements of that string. The string will contains multiple occurrences of:

Dog: Beagle

Food: Type 3

Dog: Retriever

Food: table scraps

The string will have a bunch of unneeded text before and after these multiple occurences. After I parse the elements, I want to put them into a data structure. I want to group each 'Dog' - value together, and each 'Food' - value together. I also want to group each 'dog/food' pair together. I will retrieve the this information later based on the Dog value.

I think I want to use a hash of hashes. I've been reading the appropriate parts of 'Programming Perl' (which is great), but I would appreciate a nudge in the right direction, as none of the examples matches my case closely enough for me to see a solution.

Thanks!

tl

In reply to Creating data structure from multiple pairs of information by tlemons

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