And since I'm getting excited about Perl6 pattern matching and want the practice, let's do this with a Perl6 rule, line for line with the above Perl5 regex. 
# <Perl6>

/^^ \h* $$    # Match a line that only contains horizontal whitespace,
+ if anything (blank line).
 (            # Capture to $1.
   [          # Group, but don't capture.
     ^^ \#    # Comment delimiter at the start of a line.
     .* $$    # Everything until the end of the line, includes the new
+line.
   ]+         # One or more comment lines in a row.
 )            # End $1 capture.
 $id          # The key we're looking for. This matches as a literal s
+tring, not a pattern.
/

# </Perl6>

[download]
And here's the short version: 
m/^^ \h* $$ $ret:=([^^ \# .* $$]+) $id/;

[download]
You can see I added a small bit ('$ret:=') just before the capture. This binds the value of the capture, $1 in this case, to $ret if the pattern matches, but not if it fails. Just what we want.

kelan

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In reply to Re^4: multi-line regex match quest by kelan
in thread multi-line regex match quest by smackdab

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