Your code is also not very efficient in that you're looping through the contents of the file four times. You also don't need to read the whole file into a list before processing it. Finally, you can take a shortcut and instead of checking individually for each valid key (e.g. "produce", "price", etc.), you can just take whatever is before the equals sign as a key and whatever is after as the value.

open(FILE,"<$file") or die $!; # always check for the error condition!
while (my $line = <FILE>) {
  if ($line =~ m/\[(.*)\]/) {
    push @art, { item => $1 };
  }
  elsif ($line =~ m/^(\w+)\s*=\s*(.*?)\s*$/) { # the \s*'s ignore lead
+ing and trailing whitespace.
    $art[-1]->{$1} = $2; # [-1] references the last item in the array;
+ i.e. what you just pushed on there
  }
}
close FILE;
[download]

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.