while ( <FILE> ) { $data .= $_; }

That'll work, but it's not particularly efficient because it chops the file up line by line and then puts it back together. You could use the same "slurp" idiom I showed (do { local $/; <$fh> }), which will read the entire file in one go, which is more efficient.

an alternative to using a regex [quoted from here]

I just wrote about this in general here: Parsing HTML/XML with Regular Expressions

In reply to Re^3: Matching regular expression over multiple lines by haukex
in thread Matching regular expression over multiple lines by Maire

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