Hello Sonali,

I appreciate that you are trying to learn how to do some basics in Perl, and you want to understand how things work. But one of the very best reasons to use a CPAN module for a common task is that it has probably considered all the "edge cases" that you might encounter in your data. Reputable CPAN modules come with a test suite that demonstrates this. So the risk of writing your own solution is that you may miss a special case, and you won't have a test for it to reveal your error.

At the least you should compare the results you get with the results from another processor. Here is a solution using Config::Tiny::Ordered:

use strict; use warnings;
use Config::Tiny::Ordered;

my $file = '1179628.txt';

my $config = Config::Tiny::Ordered->read( $file );

foreach my $section_name( sort keys %{ $config } ) {
    print "SECTION: $section_name\n";

    foreach my $item( @{ $config->{ $section_name } } ) {
        printf ( "  %7s : %s \n", $item->{'key'}, $item->{'value'} );
    }

    print "\n";
}

__END__
[download]

Output:

$ perl 1179628.pl
SECTION: CELL_NAME1
  COMMENT : "Perl parsing" 
    FIRST : "TEST1" 
   SECOND : "ID1" 
    THIRD : 123 
   FOURTH : "THREE" 
    FIFTH : 12345 
    SIXTH : 6789 
  SEVENTH : QWERTY 

SECTION: CELL_NAME2
  COMMENT : "Tester" 
    FIRST : "TEST2" 
   SECOND : "ID2" 
    THIRD : 1234 
   FOURTH : "FOUR" 
    FIFTH : 12345 
    SIXTH : BOARD 
  SEVENTH : MOUSE 

SECTION: CELL_NAME3
  COMMENT : "Parser" 
    FIRST : "TEST3" 
   SECOND : "ID3" 
    THIRD : 12345 
   FOURTH : "FIVE" 
    FIFTH : 12345 
    SIXTH : PAD 
  SEVENTH : KEY
[download]

Hope this helps!