I have a bunch of files I need to pull into a data structure hash of hashes. The overall record is enclosed with brackets and is composed of KEY, VALUE pairs. The KEY is always text followed by a space, then the VALUE, which can be simple text or another bracketed sub-record. For example 

 
sys ecm cloud-provider /Common/aws-ec2 {
    description "The aws-ec2 parameters"
    property-template {
        account { }
        availability-zone {
            valid-values { a b c d }
        }
        instance-type {
            valid-values { t2.micro t2.small t2.medium }
        }
        region {
            valid-values { us-east-1 us-west-1 }
        }
    }
}

[download]

That's a simple one and there are arbitrarily nested records. It was originally formatted with newlines and spaces as well but that's been removed. So, for example, KEYS are usually separated by a newline, but sometimes just spaces. It's always some type of whitespace. I've been trying to parse it out with regex'es after slurping the file in a scalar, then tried writing a recursive function to do it. Any advice on the best way to approach it would be greatly appreciated!

In reply to Parsing bracket formatted file by Stilgar

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.