It must be an interesting struct if it can hold both strings and integers.

It's not at clear just what precisely you are tryiong to achieve, so it's not possible to suggest ways to do it. However, if line-by-line procecssing presents problems, it might be worth looking at processing the whole struct initialization at once. Either accumulate the lines, one by one, in a variable, until you are sure you have it all, or else change the end-of-line character temporarily to '}'or ';' ( local $/ = '}'; ) to slurp up larger chunks. Of course, you'll have to be careful not to be fooled by an internal separator.

Most of the time I'm encouraging people to stop slurping, and process line-by-line, but every oncee in a while slurping does help.