Can someone help? I have given myself the challenge of doing some simple parsing, but in a complex way. Without focusing on why I choose to do this, can someone guide me towards a viable solution? Given the following input:

name1=value1
           name2  = value2
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This code parses it:

    while (<$input>)
    {
      chomp;
      next if /^ \s* #/;
      next if /^ \s* $/;

      if (/^ \s* ([^=\s]+) \s* = \s* (.+) $/x)
      {
        # name is in $1, value is in $2
      }
    }
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That's not the question though. The question is, how would I parse the following:

name1=value1
             name2 = value2
name3 = value3
   but wait, there is
 more
name4=
  value4
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With Perl that has the form:

    my $contents = do {local $/; <$input>};
    while ($contents =~ / ANSWER_HERE /msg)
    {
      # name is in $1, value is in $2
    }
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Specifically, I want to use the //g form, to iterate over the string, and not perform a line-by-line parse, as in the first example. My attempts have thus far failed. The closest I got (without success) was:

    my $contents = do {local $/; <$input>};
    my $name = qr/\s* [^=\s]+ \s*/x;
    while ($contents =~ /^ ($name) = \s* (.+) (?= ^ $name = | $ ) /msg
+x)
    {
      # name is in $1, value is in $2
    }
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