That was very informative. What if I have three points of data.. say, child, parent, node name (ie descriptor)? Something like:

__DATA__
b:a:apples
d:b:fuji apples
<\c>

<p>


The structure would look something like:
<p>
<c>

$VAR1 = {
          'a' => {
                   'name' => 'fruit',
                   'child' => {
                                'b' => {
                                         'name' => 'apples',
                                         'child' => {
                                                      'd' => {
                                                               'name' 
+=> 'fuji apples'
                                                             }
                                                    }
                                       }
                              }
                 }
        };
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Can your current algorithm be modified to work with this?