Then, you can forget this trick and try some of the other ideas I gave, like parsing each row at a time and cut each record at fixed columns or use some other regexp to get field values.

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = ();
my $string = "";

while(<DATA>) {
  if (/^(VLAN)\s+:\s(.*?)\s+(Status)\s+:\s(.*?)\s*$/) {
    ($hash{$1}, $hash{$3}) = ($2, $4);
  } elsif (/^(FID)\s+:\s(.*?)\s+(Name)\s+:\s(.*?)\s*$/) {
    ($hash{$1}, $hash{$3}) = ($2, $4);
  } elsif (/^(VLAN Type):\s(.*?)\s+(Last change):\s(.*?)\s*$/) {
    ($hash{$1}, $hash{$3}) = ($2, $4);
  } elsif (/^\s((Forbidden )?(Egress|Untagged) Ports):\s*$/) {
    $string = $1;
  } elsif ($string) {
    /^\s*(.*?)\s*$/;
    ($hash{$string}, $string) = ($1, "");
  }
}

print Dumper( \%hash );

__DATA__
VLAN     : 1           Status     : Enabled
FID      : 1           Name       : Some VLAN with    spaces
VLAN Type: Permanent   Last change: 2009-08-31 16:48:45
 Egress Ports:
host.0.1
 Forbidden Egress Ports:
ge.3.39
 Untagged Ports:
host.0.1

[download]
$VAR1 = {
          'Last change' => '2009-08-31 16:48:45',
          'Status' => 'Enabled',
          'Forbidden Egress Ports' => 'ge.3.39',
          'FID' => '1',
          'VLAN' => '1',
          'Untagged Ports' => 'host.0.1',
          'Egress Ports' => 'host.0.1',
          'Name' => 'Some VLAN with    spaces',
          'VLAN Type' => 'Permanent'
        };

[download]

Here, I used "(.*?)\s*" to get a trimmed value of any type field, but you should change each of them to a specific pattern for dates, integers...

Update: Forgot one field...

In reply to Re^3: Parsing issue by vitoco
in thread Parsing issue by Anonymous Monk

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