You're right about the 'new Parse::RecDescent' stuff, I've read somewhere it's better the other way around. Though personally I don't like ' .. or die .. ' since usually I want to continue afterwards with some sort of warning. (My program works without the parser, if its not available). So I usually do 'my $parser = ...' and then check the result afterwards.

The HereDioc stuff sounds like a better idea than searching for funky characters that won't appear in the text, I'll give it a whirl.
Thanks,
C.