Why don't you take one slight step further and just write your configuration file in XML. Then take a look at XML::Simple, which was originally built, I believe, for parsing XML config files.

It uses XML::Parser internally, so you'll need to install that as well.

    use XML::Simple;
    my $conf = XMLin("/foo/bar.xml");
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To see the format of the data you get back, use Data::Dumper:

    use Data::Dumper;
    print Dumper $conf;
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