my $foo = <<HERE
:TAG:This is just some text. blahblahblahblahblahblahblah blahblahblah
+. 
blahblah?  blah.:TAG:This is just some text. blahblahblahblahblahblahb
+lah blahblahblah. 
blahblah?  blah. :TAG:This is just some text. blahblahblahblahblahblah
+blah blahblahblah. 
blahblah?  blah. :TAG:This is just some more text. 
blahblahblahblahblahblahblah blahblahblah. blahblah?  blah. 
HERE
;
@foo = split /(:TAG:)/,$foo;
print join "\n",@foo
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  If the PATTERN contains parentheses, additional
  list elements are created from each matching sub­
  string in the delimiter.

        split(/([,-])/, "1-10,20", 3);

  produces the list value

        (1, '-', 10, ',', 20)
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I'm not very sure how useful this is for you, but then again, I'm not very sure how useful it is to keep the delimiters in the string :-).

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
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And despite being a while out of date, this has just proven very useful for some of my messing around :) Thanks.

If the delimiter is a constant then simply doing a join should work to reverse it.

my $delim = ':TAG:';
my @data = split $delim, $line;
my $line = join $delim, @data;
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If the delimiter varies, ie. is a regexp, then things get more fun, but I'll only think about that if needed.

The other obvious solution is to keep a copy of the original line about, no point rejoining if it's practical to simply throw it back out.

my $data = ":TAG:This:TAG:is:TAG:a:TAG:test:TAG:";
my @results = split /(?=:TAG:)/, $data;
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I've not played with these things properly so I have no idea how performant they may be, however.

It's not so much that I need to join the lines back together... What I've got is a sizable tagged data file. What I need to do is split them up by the tags, then get the character count of the data, including the tags. I was just curious if there was a better or more efficient way to do it. I thought about trying to do something with seek, but I believe that would involve taking two passes at the data to do so. I'll probably just go with something like:

my $delim = ':TAG:';
my @data = split $delim, $line;
@data = map{ $_ = $delim . $_ } @data;
print length($_) . "\n" foreach @data;
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Thanks,
Rich36

UPDATE: See Molt's update on the previous post. Works great...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while(<DATA>) {
    my @tags = ( /(\:TAG\:.*?)[(?=:)]/g );

    for my $tag ( @tags ) {
        print "$tag\n";
    }    
}
__DATA__
:TAG: This is just some text. blahblahblahblahblahblahblah blahblahbla
+h. blahblah?  blah.:TAG: This is just some text. blahblahblahblahblah
+blahblah blahblahblah. blahblah?  blah. :TAG: This is just some text.
+ blahblahblahblahblahblahblah blahblahblah. blahblah?  blah. :TAG: Th
+is is just some more text. blahblahblahblahblahblahblah blahblahblah.
+ blahblah?  blah.
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