I've been trying to improve my coding skills by reading files by records instead of just by lines. I'm having trouble with lookaheads and was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

I have data in the format below. It consists of records on multiple lines with multiple fields. I've attempted to just keep splitting the data by space or colon or whatever the seperator is, but I think a lookahead would be faster with less code. 
messages:Dec 17 09:41:08 10.14.93.7 ns5xp: NetScreen device_id=ns5xp  
system-notification-00257(traffic): start_time="2002-12-17 09:45:58" d
+uration=5 policy_id=0 service=tcp/port:8000 proto
=6 src zone=Trust dst zone=Untrust action=Permit sent=1034 rcvd=19829 
+src=10.14.94.221 dst=10.14.90.217 src_port=1059 dst_port=8000 transla
+ted ip=10.14.93.7 port=1223

messages:Dec 17 09:41:08 10.14.93.7 ns5xp: NetScreen device_id=ns5xp  
+system-notification-00257(traffic): start_time="2002-12-17 09:45:59" 
+duration=4 policy_id=0 service=tcp/port:8000 proto
=6 src zone=Trust dst zone=Untrust action=Permit sent=722 rcvd=520 src
+=10.14.94.221 dst=10.14.90.217 src_port=1060 dst_port=8000 translated
+ ip=10.14.93.7 port=1224

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In the above, I'd like to read each section and put the results for the record in a hash, with the left part of the = as the label and the right part as the data, like so; $hash{$label} = $data; Then after each record I can print the labels I'm interested in. 
while ( /^(.+)\=(.+?)(?=^.+?:)/mgso ) {
    $label = $1;
    $data = $2;    
}

[download]
I'm just not getting lookaheads and have been having trouble finding an example like my data. Any pointers?

In reply to Parsing text files with a regex lookahead by jalewis2

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