Why use negative-width assertions, when you're already using the /m flag?

To catch the broken lines. Yours is a very elegant construction, which I intend to steal, but I don't think that snippet meets the original requirements as it is. if you knew the tags wouldn't contain numerals, which I doubt, you could change it to:

my $info = do { local $/; <DATA> };
my %lines = $info =~ /(\d+): ([^\d]+)/gs;
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but otherwise I can't see an alternative to the (?:^|\n).

btw, is there any way to catch the matched values during a split? it would make this nice and tidy.

update: damnation. redundant again.

another update: I couldn't resist shrinking gjb's cheaper version and introducing a useful but quite unrequested array reference:

my ($key, %data);
for (<DATA>) {
    /^(?:(\d+):\s*)*(.+)$/;
    push @{ $data{ $key = $1 || $key } }, $2;
 
}
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