in reply to converting an arbitrary string into a hash based on a pattern

Thanks holli and gopalr. Both of you gave me a fantastic (if not a perfect) start ;-). Turns out, there are many variations in my strings, and neither solution found all the key-value pairs correctly, however, gopalr's solution worked better on the data I threw at it. One particular miss was when there were a series of square brackets adjacent to each other, as in 
FOO[this][that][other]

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which had to resolve into 
FOO => 'thisthatother'

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and the other was, empty square brackets were not caught. In other words, 
BAR []

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should have become 
BAR => ''

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In any case, many thanks to the both of you for clearing my haze. I can take your suggestions and create one that will work for me.
--
when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

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Re^2: converting an arbitrary string into a hash based on a pattern
by holli (Abbot) on Mar 04, 2005 at 06:03 UTC 
    use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash;

$_="ABCD----[this]  fgab [that]  BFTE-- [other] AB CD   EF---- [foo]  
+FOO[this][that][other] BAR []";

while ( /\G\s*([\w ]+)[\s-]*\[([\w\[\]]*)\]/g )
{
  $hash{$1}=$2;
  $hash{$1} =~ s/\]\[//g;
}

print Dumper (\%hash);

#$VAR1 = {
#          'BAR ' => '',
#          'fgab ' => 'that',
#          'ABCD' => 'this',
#          'BFTE' => 'other',
#          'FOO' => 'thisthatother',
#          'AB CD   EF' => 'foo'
#        };

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    I just love regexes. Try to implement that in VB!


    holli, /regexed monk/
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[d/l]

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