If you're still running out of memory, you'll have to find out where you are storing your data and maybe not store all the data in RAM. If you are storing the bulk of your data in a hash, an easy way of trading time for space is to use DB_File or some other key/value store that can be tied to a hash. Update: Also see Tie::DBI, which just had a new release out.

Often it also helps to output progress through your file so that you get an idea where in your program you run out of memory.

In your example you're opening a filehandle named XML, so I assume you want to convert your input stream to xml format. If this is right we would like to see how the xml output is produced. Probably you're using a memory intensive way.

McA

Ok Let me make it more clear..Im fetching those variables from a flat file and printing it in the XML file. The order of printing of the variable will differ from how we are getting the variable.

#!/usr/bin/perl

open (my $INFO, "<", "$File") or die("Cannot open the flat file $!");

open(my $LOG,">>LOG_file") or die("Cannot open $!");

open(my $XML,">xml_file") or die("Cannot open $!");

while (defined(my $line2 = $INFO)) {

    $line2 =~ s/&/&amp;/g;

    print "$line2\n";

    my $segment = substr($line2,0,2);

    if($segment eq "00")

    {

    my $Var1 = trim(substr($line2,40,8));

    }

    if($segment eq "A0")

    {

    $Var2 = trim(substr($line2,2,9));

    $Var3 = trim(substr($line2,14,3));

    $Var4 = trim(substr($line2,20,42));

    $Var5 = trim(substr($line2,62,30));

and so on

}

    print XML "<Header>\n";

    print XML "<AAA>VAR1<\/AAA>\n";

    print XML "<BBB>VAR2<\/BBB>\n";

    print XML "<CCC>VAR3<\/CCC>\n";

  print XML "<DDD>VAR4<\/DDD>\n";

  print XML "<EEE>VAR5<\/EEE>\n";

    print XML "<Header>\n";

close $LOG;

close $XML;

close $INFO;

sub trim($)

{

   my $string = shift;

    $string =~ s/^\s+//;

   $string =~ s/\s+$//;

   return $string;

}

How much data do you have to collect to decide in which order you can generate the xml? Do you have to collect all records of the input file? Do you only have to collect a sequence of segments to create a - let's call it - xml record? Sorry, but your excerpt didn't help?

How big is the input file?

McA