I would suggest that the original poster tried SEARCHING the site to look for some relevant answers, and avoid a lot more RTFM answers...

__REFORMATTED MESSAGE__

This works fine for outputing to file, however, still unable to assign to array without opening the output afterwards.
Would be good if I could set overall match to array at the same time as sending to output.

#!perl.exe 
my $filename="e:\test.out.txt"; 
my $output="e:\out.txt"; 
sub body
{
   if (-r $filename) 
   { 
      open(FILE,"<$filename");
      open(OUTPUT, "> $output");
      while()
      {
         chomp;
         if (/Datasource:/) { print OUTPUT "\n", $_; }
         if (/Passed:/) { $section="passed"; next; }
         elsif (/Failed:/)
         {
            $section="failed";
            print OUTPUT "\n",$_;
            next;
         }
         elsif (/Exception:/)
         {
            $section="except";
            print OUTPUT "\n",$_;
            next;
         }

         if ($section ne "passed")
         {
            if (/(test\.)|(Summary:)/)
            {
               print OUTPUT "\n",$_;
            } 
         }
      }
      close(FILE);
      close(OUTPUT);
   }
   else
   {
      print("cant read file ",$filename,"\n");
   } 
}
[download]

-- Graq's Home Page

Your reformatting has missed the fact that the AM actually had while (<FILE>). I've now added <code> tags to the original post which makes it clearer.

But not necessarily very clear :)

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."

Argh..yes.
Not only was I that slow about it that someone else had added the code before me, but I went and got it wrong.
DOH!

I'll keep trying..

Graq

"Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!"