How can I access INI files from Perl?

Question

What is the best way to parse INI file in Perl and convert it to hash?

Answer 1

Nitpicking on the above:

Tie::Cfg, as downloaded from CPAN, does not handle sections and keys that may have spaces in them. It needs to be changed by adding quotes (") around the "keys" when setting the hash entries for both the section and the keys within the sections. The files I'm trying to read were generated by MS Windows' folks, and thus have plenty of spaces to go around.

Config::Tiny, Config::IniFiles are fussy about the format. If any line is not of the form [section] or key=val, they throw an error and one can't get to the hashes, which, at least in Config::Files, are filled in properly anyway. It would be nice to have an ignore error option. The files I'm trying to read have some spurious M4 lines in it, that I could run through m4 to get rid of, but that is not necessary in what I'm trying to do with this particular script.