You probably want to split on \nend\n or so, and print an item if it matches your regex.

At least I guess that's what you want, since you didn't actually ask a question.

You will find it easier to access the records if you read them into a suitable data structure first. In Perl, that usually means a hash:

my %hash;
$hash{$1} = $2 while $var =~ /storeID = (\d+)\s+(.*?)end/gs;
[download]

Then you can search like this:

my $criterion = ...;

print "storeID = $_\n", $hash{$_} for grep { $hash{$_} =~ /$criterion/
+ } keys %hash;
[download]

Hope that helps,

http://scsys.co.uk:8002/228600

I have many entries like the ones presented stored in a variable $var I only want to print the entries that have stockStatus = In stock or stockStatus = Limited Stock ignoring case though on the match so i know /i and a multiline match

It seems each record now ends with a blank line, rather than the word “end” as in the OP. And each record is a collection of lines of the form key = value. So we add another loop, and create a hash in which each key is the storeId (as before), but each value is a (reference to a) nested hash of key/value pairs:

Read more... (2 kB)

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,