You seem to be using some modules to do your work. Could you please specify which they are. The code below is just rephrasing your snippet and loads the data into a hash. 

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my %data = map {
        s/#.*//;  # remove comments
        s/^\s+//; # remove leading white space
        s/\s+$//; # remove trailing white space
        m/(.*?)\s*=\s*(.*)/; # split on =, ignoring surrounding spaces
} <DATA>;
print Dumper(%data);

__DATA__
NAME=John Smith
AGE=15
RANK=Tier 1
URL=http://somesite.com

[download]

What is missing is probably something like my $record = REC->new( %data ); but I cannot test this hypothesis as I don't where REC comes from. Hope this helps...

In reply to Re: read a hash from a file by hdb
in thread read a hash from a file by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.