Will this work?

It's kinda verbose, but I couldn't figure out how to get rid
of the first element during split.

{
    undef $/;
    @temp = split /;/, <DATA>; # slurp file
    shift @temp; # Get rid of everything before first semicolon
    %sections = map { my($sect, @param) = split /[\n\r\f]+/;($sect, \@
+param) } @temp;
}

# Just to test it
foreach (keys %sections) {
    print "$_ => [@{$sections{$_}}]\n";
}

__DATA__
;section1
foo
bar
;section2
bar
baz

[download]

In reply to Re: Tidier and more efficient parsing code by lirm
in thread Tidier and more efficient parsing code by JPaul

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