When you want to obtain data before and after a certain delimiter, think of split.

Here's an example to get you started; it might need some tweaking to do what you want.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use autodie;

open my $h, '<', 'file.txt';
local $/ = '';

while (my $block = <$h>) {
    # split off header
    my $body = (split /==========\n/, $block )[-1];
    # split on the long ***** line
    my ($before, $after) = split /\*{20,}\s*/, $body, 2;
    print "before: $before\n";
    print "after:  $after\n";

}
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Note that I've used the paragraph mode for reading the records; that's explained in the documentation for the $/ variable.