You don't say what different treatment should be applied inside and outside the info block, so I'll have to skip that for now.

Here is a recursive solution for an arbitrary depth of hash.

my %hash=();
Define( \%hash, split /\s*\=\s*/ )
    for (split /\n/, $scalar);

sub Define { # value returned not used above,
             # but can be useful for some other cases
    my $href = shift;
    my $key = shift or return $href;
    defined ( $href -> { $key } ) or $href -> { $key } = {};
    my $value = shift or return $href -> { $key };
    @_ and return Define( $href -> { $key }, $value, @_ );
    return $href -> { $key } = $value;
}
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