As you haven't shown any code, I assume that your problem is with the general approach. I suggest doing it the following way:

  1. Read the file, separate the lines into hashes of property => $value
  2. For each hash, add a property children => []
  3. For each hash, add it to the children list of the hash which has the Child propery the same value as this hashes Parent propery. You might want to create another hash to ease the lookup.

What do you mean by "indicate if a node was overwritten by its parent"? Please show us an example of where such overwriting happens and what the implications of this are.

In reply to Re: Creating a tree from a parent child list, that also includes node specific properties... by Corion
in thread Creating a tree from a parent child list, that also includes node specific properties... by bryank

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.