Perl Programming Assist Please

I'm going crazy here, my brain apparently fried from the weekend or the water or something, looking for some perl assistance from my perl-knowledgeable buds (you know who you are... :)

I'm creating a menu system and converting entries in a database into a perl data structure that I can then parse to create an HTML menu. I'm having a real problem with the first part. I want to take a list of strings such as:

/about/contact
/about/contact/map
/about/contact/email
/about
/products
/products/style1
/products/style2
/products/widgets
/products/widgets/foo
/products/widgets/bar
/products/widgets/baz
/products/widgets/baz/qux

(The strings can have infinite depth (not restricted to 3 or 5 sub-levels) and is dynamically pulled from a database.)

I want to take this and convert it into a datastructure such as this one here (which is part of HTML::Widgets::NavMenu).

The gory details are a bit.... gorier. The strings are just an element of an object created out of the database, and the 'path' is actually a list of numbers (/1/2/3) but this seemed easier to work with.

This stuff used to be simple.... argh, embarrassed :(