a slight variation on Corion's proposal, tested here at the command line:

$ perl -e 'use strict;
> use warnings;
> use Data::Dumper;
>
> my $string = <<STR;
STR>

> SECTION 1
>
> This is section 1
>
> SECTION 2
>
> This is section 2
>
> STR
>
>
> my %values = ($string =~ /(SECTION \d+)\s+([\w ]+)/mg);
> print Dumper \%values;
> '
$VAR1 = {
          'SECTION 2' => 'This is section 2',
          'SECTION 1' => 'This is section 1'
        };
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