You may be overthinking this. Records are probably not going to be more than like 100-150 characters, so unless you have hundreds of thousands of records, you're not likely to run into memory problems. But yes, as other people have mentioned, you can set the line separator to Name, like so:
use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; my $first = 'Name'; # Name of first field in each record my %data; $/ = "$first: "; <DATA>; while (<DATA>) { chomp; $_ = $/ . $_; %data = (); $data{$1} = $2 while m/^(.*?): (.*?)$/mg; print Dumper(\%data); } __DATA__ Name: Theodore Pride Phone: (911) 911-9111 Address: 1234 Road Name: Theodore Pride Phone: (911) 911-9111 Address: 1234 Road

In reply to Re: proper way of matching multiple line patterns by TJPride
in thread proper way of matching multiple line patterns by perlperlperl

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