peraphs you want to use a regex (regular expression) to to this kind of job.

perlrequick gives you the basic, while perlretut is a longer introduction to the matter.

Pay attention with \n newlines in your data: normally the . dot does not match them.

If you capture with (your pattern) parens then you'll have results stored into $1 ( $2 .. etc) see perlvar

In my homenode you can find some tool to play with regexes online or offline.

L*