Here is a different approach that splits on whitespace and the dash: 
my ($key, $value) = split /\s*-\s+/, $line;

[download]
Update: Sorry, accidentally submitted too early. Anyway, to handle the continuation lines, we need a loop: 
while (<>) {
   if (/^(\S+)\s*-\s+(.+)$/) {
      push @pair, [$key,$value] if $key; # save prev pair
      $key = $1;
      $value = $2;
   }
   elsif (/^\s+-\s+(.+)$/) {
      $value .= $1;
   }
   else {
      print "Badly formatted line: $_\n";
   }
}

[download]

-Mark

In reply to Re: Perl Regular Expressions by kvale
in thread Perl Regular Expressions by rsiedl

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