I would not try using the input seperator for doing things like this.. It's a lot easier to parse this line by line..:

# open file, DB-connection, etc..

my %data;
while (my $line = <INPUT>)
{
  chomp ($line);
  if ($line =~ m/^-+$/)
  {
    &save (%data);
    %data = ();
  }
  elsif ($line =~ m/^(\w+):\s(.+)$/)
  {
    $data{lc($1)} = $2;
  }
  elsif ($debug)
  {
    warn $line;
  }
}

sub save
{
  # up to you :)
}
[download]

You should note that the regex is not optimal. If it was as easy to read as the above I would have written m/([^:]+):\s/ with $1 and $'..Dig intp perlre when interested. Another thing to note it that you should make sure that all the keys of that hash you want to save to a database has all well defined values! Oh, last but not least: The only reason I wrote &save was to demonstrate that it is not a build-in function..

Regards,
-octo-