Is this something that is possible in Perl?

Of course.

The usual strategy to build a data structure of arbitary depth is the "create as you traverse" approach, ie you just walk level by level, create them if needed, and always keep a reference to the previous level to start the current iteration from.

Here you don't even need to do that, because you create at most one level at a time.

Since you didn't explain exactly how the resulting data structure should look like, I've added the description as an extra key called DESCRIPTION.

Without further ado, the code: 

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

my %h;
my @depth;
while (<DATA>){
    chomp;
    /^(\s*)/;
    # 'cause it's 4 spaces here, not tabs
    my $level = length($1) / 4;
    s/^\s+//;
    my ($key, $val) = split /\s{2,}/, $_, 2;
    my $h = $level == 0 ? \%h : $depth[$level - 1];
    $h->{$key}{DESCRIPTION} = $val;
    $depth[$level] = $h->{$key};
}

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \%h;


__DATA__
Assault    Assault
    Battery    Assault and Battery
    Sexual    Sexual Assault
    Deadly    Assault with a deadly weapon
        with    Assault with a deadly weapon
        without    Assault without a deadly weapon
    Aggravated    Aggravated Assault

[download]

Here is the output, with reduced indentation for better readability: 

VAR1 = {
    'Assault' => {
        'Sexual' => {
            'DESCRIPTION' => 'Sexual Assault'
        },
        'Battery' => {
            'DESCRIPTION' => 'Assault and Battery'
        },
        'DESCRIPTION' => 'Assault',
        'Aggravated' => {
            'DESCRIPTION' => 'Aggravated Assault'
        },
        'Deadly' => {
            'DESCRIPTION' => 'Assault with a deadly weapon',
            'without' => {
                'DESCRIPTION' => 'Assault without a deadly weapon'
            },
            'with' => {
                'DESCRIPTION' => 'Assault with a deadly weapon'
            }
        }
    }
};

[download]

To look up elements of arbitrary depth, you can use something like

sub lookup {
    my $h = \%h;
    $h = $h->{$_} for @_;
    return $h->{DESCRIPTION};
}

say lookup 'Assault';
say lookup qw/Assault Deadly with/;

[download]

Which again drags a reference from the lookup of the previous level to achieve arbitrary depth.

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

In reply to Re: dynamic hash nesting by moritz
in thread dynamic hash nesting by karrakis

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