Re: Parsing multi-line record with varying data

[Kenosis]

Building upon BrowserUk's suggestion, perhaps the following will be helpful:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

$/ = 'rn:';
my %hash;
my $entry = 1;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    /\S/ and $hash{ $entry++ } = () = /id-info:/g;
}

print Dumper \%hash;

__DATA__
rn: uid:<user>, <irrelevant-text>
id-info: <URL> | <ID> | <random-string>
creation-time: 1366069064
rn: uid:<user>, <irrelevant-text>
id-info: <URL> | <ID> | <random-string>
id-info: <URL> | <ID> | <random-string>
id-info: <URL> | <ID> | <random-string>
creation-time: 1366069064
rn: uid:<user>, <irrelevant-text>
id-info: <URL> | <ID> | <random-string>
id-info: <URL> | <ID> | <random-string>

deletion-time: 1367949064
creation-time: 1366069064
rn: uid:<user>, <irrelevant-text>
creation-time: 1366069064

Output:

$VAR1 = {
          '4' => 0,
          '1' => 1,
          '3' => 2,
          '2' => 3
        };