I ask for the wisdom of those who use Perl more than I do, and ask for their opinion on whether the following will work:

while (<>) {
    $foundit = 0;
    chomp;
    $input=$_;
    
    if($input =~ /what is/i or $input =~ /who is/i or $input =~ /tell 
+me about/i){
        $input =~ s/what is//ig;
        $input =~ s/who is//ig;
        $input =~ s/tell me about//ig;
        $input =~ s/\?//g;
        $input =~ s/a //i;
        ($part1, $part2, $part3) = split " ", $input;
open (FILEHANDLE, "<enwikisource-20090621-pages-articles.xml")

        while(<FILEHANDLE>) {
            if($_ =~ /<title>$input/i or $_ =~ /<title>$part1 $part2/i
+ or $_ =~ /<title>$part2 $part3/i or $_ =~ /<title>$part1/i or $_ =~ 
+/<title>$part2/i or $_ =~ /<title>$part3/i and $correct == 0){
                $correct = 1;
            }else{
                continue;
                }        
            if($_=~ /<p>/i and $foundit == 0){
                $foundit = 1;
                $test = $_;
                last;
            }
                
        }
        close FILEHANDLE;

    
        ($crap,@goodstuff) = split ">", $test;
        foreach $item (@goodstuff) {
            ($finalgoodstuff,$crap)=split "<",$item;
            $beststuff .= $finalgoodstuff;
        }
        print "\n";
        print"$beststuff";
        print "\n";
        $beststuff = "";
        $finalgoodstuff = "";
    }
}
[download]

will this work? I am working on a 2.4 GigaByte file (all of Wikipedia) and my Ram is only 2.0 Gigs, so I need all your help on whether this will work, or crash my machine. best case (working like I think it does) it should stop getting data when the file gets to the right point, worst case I run out of Ram and something bad happens....

if anyone could help me, I would be eternally grateful! Thanks!!