define effective...because it would be possibly more effective if you specified which program the input file came from. matlab? lisp? other? if it's from any well known program, most likely already had a parser written for it, in perl or other that you could adapt.
the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H
The sample file is a snippet from one of our CAD tools. It is a Lisp structure. There is a Lisp-based programming API to access the data from within the CAD tool, but we need to access this data externally. The CAD company does not provide externally accessible APIs. I will check on the CAD forums to see if someone may have written a Perl parser.
Thanks for the suggestion.