Enlightened Monks!

I'm storing a few descriptions within the code. Right now, it's done in a very basic way:

my %desc;

$desc{'room'} =<<END;
some text here, probably something
a few lines long
END

$desc{'wall'} =<<END;
another text here, probably something
a few lines long [sometimes with braces]

sometimes with a few paragraphs
END
[download]

Honestly, I don't like it. I would much rather see it in the DATA section (and later in a file of its own), with the following (or similar) layout:

__DATA__
[room]
some text here, probably something
a few lines long

[wall]
another text here, probably something
a few lines long [sometimes with braces]

sometimes with a few paragraphs
[download]

Does anyone know of a Config:: module that would accept such syntax? Or a way to put something like multiple __DATA__ sections in the code, each with a name of their own?

I could parse such a section myself, with something like this:

my %desc;
my $key = 'error';
for (<DATA>) {
    if (/^\[(\w+)\]\s*$/) {
        $key = $1;
    }
    else {
        $desc{$key} .= $_;
    }
}
die if defined $desc{'error'};
[download]

... but it seems worse than the initial solution, with direct assignments to the hash keys.

Still, maybe there is a more elegant way to parse such a DATA section.

UPDATE:

Can I use split with a regexp pattern, and use a capture within the pattern, to get the hash key?

I managed to find the answer to this one. The code below produces the desired %desc hash. But the grep/split combo looks only marginally better than the loop example above.

my $data=<<ENDS;
[room]
some text here, probably something
a few lines long

[wall]
another text here, probably something
a few lines long [sometimes with braces]

sometimes with a few paragraphs
ENDS

%desc = grep {$_} (split (/\[(\w+)\]/, $data));
[download]

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