In the spirit of perhaps using a screwdriver to pound a nail (or maybe just putting arbitrary restrictions on yourself...sort of like composing a 12-tone piece), I wanted to see if I could use RFC: DBIx::Iterator to solve this. The function in the module returns an iterator that returns a hashref, so I wrapped the iterator returned from that to return an array (so this makes an iterator that returns a row of data at a time, so it is not quite what the OP asked for...but you can easily wrap the iterator to do that). Here is what I came up with:
#!/usr/bin/perl


use strict;
use warnings;

use DBIx::Iterator qw(mk_iterator list_iterator);

my $data_struct = [
...snip...(see OP)
];

my $iter = flatten($data_struct);

while ( my @row = $iter->() ) {
    print "@row\n";
}

sub flatten {
  my $data = shift;
  my $iter = mk_iterator(_flatten(0, $data));
  sub {
    my $data = $iter->() or return;
    return @$data{sort { $a <=> $b } keys %$data};
  }
}

sub _flatten {
  my ($i, $data) = @_;
  my @tmp = @$data;
  my @groups = ();
  while (@tmp) {
    my @nxt_group;
    push @nxt_group, shift @tmp
      while @tmp > 2 and !ref($tmp[1]);
    push @nxt_group, @tmp and @tmp=()
      if @tmp <= 2 and !grep ref($_), @tmp;
    if ( @nxt_group ) {
      push @groups, [ mk_list_iter($i, @nxt_group) ];
    }
    if ( @tmp ) {
      my @nxt_grp;
      push @nxt_grp, mk_list_iter($i, shift(@tmp));
      push @nxt_grp, _flatten($i+1, shift(@tmp))
        while @tmp and ref($tmp[0]);
      push @groups, [ @nxt_grp ];
    }
  }
  return @groups;
}

sub mk_list_iter {
  my ($i, @list) = @_;
  sub {
    list_iterator(
      LIST   => [ map { [$_] } @list ],
      SELECT => [ $i ],
      @_
    );
  }
}

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In reply to Re: A maybe(?) interesting comp-sci type problem by runrig
in thread A maybe(?) interesting comp-sci type problem by Anonymous Monk

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