I think you might want to try to rephrase your question. You want to "read" a certain pattern, but then tell us that it can contain "any letters or numbers".

How you we recognise the data that you are interested in? And what do you want to do with it?

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

You don't have any lines with '/C1, 2(11)'.

Do you mean 'C1, 2(11)'?

my $pattern = 'C1, 2(11)';
while (<DATA>)
{
 next if not /$pattern/;
 # do something with the line if it has $pattern
}
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Or does the line have to start with 'C1, 2(11)'?

next if not /^$pattern/;
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--
Regards,
Helgi Briem
helgi DOT briem AT decode DOT is

sorry for not being clear.
the pattern that i want to match from the file is /[A-Z]\sd+,\sd+\(d+\)/
e.g. C 1, 1(11)

I want to store them in an array once matched.
harry

Do you mean something like this?

use strict;
use warnings;
my $str = qq/
1 2 3 4
----------
C 2, 2(13) R 2, 2( 8) C 2, 2(13) 
----------
C 2, 2(11) C 2, 2(13) R 2, 2(18) 
----------
C 2, 2(18) C 1, 2(11) C 2, 2(13) 
----------
C 1, 2(11) C 2, 2(18) C 2, 2(11) 
/;

my @match = ($str =~ /([A-Z]\s\d+,\s\d+\(\s*\d+\))/g);
print "$_\n" for @match;

__END__

C 2, 2(13)
R 2, 2( 8)
C 2, 2(13)
C 2, 2(11)
C 2, 2(13)
R 2, 2(18)
C 2, 2(18)
C 1, 2(11)
C 2, 2(13)
C 1, 2(11)
C 2, 2(18)
C 2, 2(11)
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To read file into a string you can do:

my $str = slurp('file.txt');

sub slurp {
        open(F, shift);
        local $/ = undef;    # undef record seperator
        my $txt = <F>;
        close(F);
        return $txt;
}
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