Thanks(++) - I had missed that detail in the OP. As you pointed out in your update, it shouldn't be difficult to craft a record separator that's distinctive and easy to strip out. Alternately, it might not be so bad to "encode" record-internal blank lines in some distinctive and "easily decodable" manner - e.g.: 
$/ = "";
while (<DATA>) {
    s/^(.*)\n//;
    $key = $1;
    s/\n==(?=\n)/\n/g;
    $structure{$key} = $_;
}

__DATA__
key1
Here's a text block including blank lines ("encoded" as "==" in the pe
+rl script):
==
and here's a part of the block that's enclosed within "blank lines"
==
and here's the last part of the value for key1.

key2
blah blah
etc.

[download]
UPDATED to use the minimum necessary look-ahead, so that consecutive "blank lines" inside a record would be handled properly.

In reply to Re^3: Storing multiple blocks of text in the __DATA__ section by graff
in thread Storing multiple blocks of text in the __DATA__ section by blindluke

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