Fellow monks, Ok I have been meditating on this for awhile on and can't seem to find enlightenmant. I have been lurking here for years and usually find what I am looking for by searching around the site. This question is more of regexp problem than anything else I suppose. Here is what I am doing. I am trying to parse the following from a file: 

//File Snippet Begin//
.
float myVarA 
<
float UIMin = 1;
float UIMax = 0;
float UIStep = .001;
string UIWidget = "slider";
> =  0.5f;

float myVarB = 1.0;

float4 myVarC = {1,0,0,1};
.
//File Snippet End//

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What I would like to do is capture the info in a hash whose keys are the variable names listed above. For example lets say I parsed myVarA this is what I want to capture: 
$vars{myVarA}->{type} = "float"
$vars{myVarA}->{value} = 0.5
$vars{myVarA}->{ui}->{min}=0
$vars{myVarA}->{ui}->{max}=1
$vars{myVarA}->{ui}->{step}=0.001
$vars{myVarA}->{ui}->{widget}="slider"

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The difficulty (at least for me anyway) is capturing the "UI" information "if" it exists. I have tried different regex fencings but am unable to capture both variables with "UI" information and variables without. The real problem is the data-types inside the "UI" description delimited by the "<" and ">" characters. I also tried simplifying things by loading the whole file into a string marking up the data-types and throwing out the whitespace as follows: 
#after dumping file to string
$file_str=~ s/(float|float2|float3|float4|string)\s+/$+\#/g; 
$file_str =~ s/\s*//g;

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But even in this from I can't come up with a way to split off the UI description because of the data-types inside the carrots. I tried: 
$file_str=~s/\<.*(string|float|float2|float3|float4).*\>//g;

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as well as: 
@lines = split/(float|float2|float3|float4)\#\<.*\>=.*\;/,$file_str;

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but no go... I am hoping that the enlightened here can show me the way.. :)

In reply to Tricky Parsing Ko'an by jmmistrot

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