...and provide a good sample of your data (e.g., is [ abababa bcbcbcb ] on one line or are there multiple instances per line or can one be spread across two lines?). If it contains information that's not suitable for public consumption, redact that...

Also, help me understand the following:

I have to put each chunk in different arrays.

Do you really mean one array per chunk (i.e., creating one-element arrays) or did you mean that each chunk needs to be an array element?

sorry for confusion.

[
abababa
bcbcbcb
]
[download]

Data is in this format. It is not in a line. But each start with "[" and end with "]". the array in which i shall put all these 4 lines would not be a one element array then. I shall put this 4 lines in one array , another 4 lines in another array... like this fashion, i need to reads whole file.

Thank you for the clarification.

Why a separate array for each 'chunk?' How will you manage these? What's the end result? Are there blank lines between these chunks? Also, how large is this file?

Hi, i am doing some code.

Show us what you got...

my full work is to collect that chunks. Do some modification in them individually and then reprint them in a file. Thats it !!. I have just hoping some help to how to collect chunks

You said you are doing some code. Someone followed up asking you to show what you've got. In other words, show the code you've written so far. You seem to have forgotten in your follow-up to do that. Show the code you've written so far so we know what to help you with.




Dave

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your post, but it kind of sounds like you're trying to determine the size of the array for the purpose of creating an array with that number of elements. In Perl, you don't need to know the planned/needed size of the array to create the array. In your code, you just need something like my @list; to create an empty array named 'list'.

You might find the following perldocs useful:

• perldata
• push
• pop
• shift
• unshift

Hi vkp,

If I may add, To get good answers to your question, please check How do I post a question effectively?

..Please suggest some path to do so..
You can check this documentation perldsc

sorry for so much confusion in my question

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Data::Dumper;

my @arrays;
my $count = -1;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    $count++ if $_ eq '[';
    next if /[][]/;
    push @{ $arrays[$count] }, $_;
}

print Dumper \@arrays;

__DATA__
[
aaaa
bbbbb
]
[
ccc
dddd
eeeee
]
[
f
]
[download]

... and in addition make your SOPW responsive to all the other replies.

sorry what is SOPW

Explained in a message, but FTR and for future readers:

SOPW is "Seekers of Perl Wisdom," the section where you made your "OP" or "original post" -- the first one in the thread. You can open your OP, scroll down, and edit it with the answers requested above. Make a note that that text is an UPDATE.

I have no problem with pattern matching. and can u please elaborate where to use split in this case

Well, split your example by \n. You may also want to play with $/ to split a sequence of these examples from a file to smaller parts to be splitted by \n. Or you may read your file by for lines if you check the value of the $. variable.
Sorry if my advice was wrong.

Doesn't the data look close to a data structure already? A few regexes and an eval ...

#!/usr/bin/perl

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

local $/;
my $data=<DATA>;
$data=~s{\[}{[qw(}sg;
$data=~s{\]}{)],}sg;
eval '$data=\['.$data.']';
warn Data::Dumper->Dump([\$data],[qw(*data)]).' ';
__DATA__
[
abc
def
]
[
ghi
jkl
mno
]
[download]

and we have ...

$data = \\[
              [
                'abc',
                'def'
              ],
              [
                'ghi',
                'jkl',
                'mno'
              ]
            ];
  at pmdata.pl line 13, <DATA> chunk 1.
[download]

Safe->reval