Parsing with a state variable ($category in this case) is one way to remember which heading th text falls under:
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;
use warnings;
my %parse_tree;
my $category;
while (my $line = <DATA>) {
if ($line =~ /^(\w+:)$/) {
$category = $1;
$parse_tree{ $category} = [];
}
else {
push @{$parse_tree{ $category}}, $line;
}
}
print Dumper( \%parse_tree);
__DATA__
heading1:
text1
text2
text3
heading2:
text4
text5
text6
yields
$VAR1 = {
'heading1' => [
'text1
',
'text2
',
'text3
'
],
'heading2' => [
'text4
',
'text5
',
'text6
'
]
};
In the dumped hash, note that the newlines are preserved.
Update: altered the regex to capture the colon.