I've been handed a file that is laid out thusly 
begin_section
     name=section_name
     type=section_type

     begin_item
          name=item_name
          desc=item_description
          link=item_link
     end_item

     begin_item
          .
          .
          .
     end_item

end_section

begin_section
     .
     .
     .
end_section

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and so on and so on. What would be a good way of reading this file into a data structure that I can use nicely? I'd thought of setting up a couple of objects; a Section object, which would then contain a number of Item objects. And maybe an overall object to hold all the Section objects. But I'm stalling at the file parsing stage. I don't seem to be able to do this kind of thing: 
if(/begin_item/) {
  while (!/end_item/) {
  ...deal with data members here...
  }
}

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Am I approaching this problem the wrong way? Many thanks in advance for any advice you may have.

In reply to Turning a datafile into a data structure by pwhysall

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