use strict;

while (<DATA>)
{
  next if 1../^CPN/;

  #-- Parse lines...
  print;
}


__DATA__
BOM Report 
------------------- 
BOM  : 
Date : 19 Sep 2001 14:57:17 
Total # of CPN's (41) 
----------------------- 
CPN Quantity MPN Vendor 
51-0597-000 15 06035C103MAT2A AVX 
51-0597-000 15 06035C103MAT4A AVX 
51-0597-000 15 C0603C103M5RAC KEMET ELECTRONICS
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The operator you speak of is not the range operator, but is in fact the flip-flop operator (oooh, it's a sneaky one!). I believe this was grabbed from AWK, and is *uber* handy when doing text processing (like AWK). You can have all sorts of funky variations on the above, from fancy regexps to simple line numbers. I shall use the example from the always informative perl docs (man perlop) -

if (101 .. 200) { print; }  # print 2nd hundred lines
next line if (1 .. /^$/);   # skip header lines
s/^/> / if (/^$/ .. eof()); # quote body

# parse mail messages
while (<>) {
    $in_header =   1  .. /^$/;
    $in_body   = /^$/ .. eof();
    # do something based on those
    } continue {
        close ARGV if eof;              # reset $. each file
}
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Indeed a thing of beauty!
HTH


broquaint

This works fine but I don't want to include my matching line into the skip. Is this possible.

Sure if you just do something like this -

while(<FILE>) {
    next unless /^CPN/ .. eof() and !/^CPN/;
    [munge data here]
}
[download]

HTH

broquaint

Of course, in light of the other responses, I suspect that I've been misled by your use of "remove": you just want to skip the irrelevant lines.

Which actually raises the question of whether you're interested in the header lines:

New file :
CPN     Quantity        MPN     Vendor  

which lie between the first an second section (you may well be, since these will allow you to spot the fact that you are indeed changing section).

However, if you're only interested in the data lines

51-0597-000     15      06035C103MAT2A  AVX themselves 

then:

  while (<INFILE>) {
    next unless
      /^(\d{2}-\d{4}-\d{3})\s+(\d+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)$/;
  # Not only have we thrown out the garbage,
  # but the data fields are now in $1..$4
    ...
    more processing
    ...
  }
[download]

will skip all the non-data lines, as well as breaking the string apart into its constituent fields (you can obviously taylor the regexp to your precise needs, if you need to break out the middle component of the first field, for example).

LINE:
while (my $line = <INFILE>) {
    next LINE while ($line =~ /./ .. $line =~ /CPN/);

    # Once here, you have matched the first CPN line and onwards.
}
[download]

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

# cnt=`wc -l filename | sed -e 's/ *\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/'`
# perl -ni -e 'print if /^CPN/ .. '$cnt';' filename
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broquaint