That's not the all of it, I have reformatted the original question (see below) - and I still am feeling unsure what it is the original post actually wants...
And there appears to be numerous other helpful suggestions to improve the code.

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");
   } 
}
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