tobyink has provided an excellent solution. For your future reference--and in case the need arises again--there are Perl modules that can be used for parsing the kind of text you have. Here's an example that uses Mojo::DOM to parse your <a> tags:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Mojo::DOM;

my $text = <<END;
<a>
word1
word2
word3
</a>
<a>
word4
word5
</a>
<a>
word6
word7
</a>
END

my $dom = Mojo::DOM->new($text);

my $i = 1;
for my $chunk ( $dom->find('a')->each ) {
    print 'Chunk ' . $i++ . ': ' . $chunk->text . "\n";
}

[download]

Output:

Chunk 1: word1 word2 word3
Chunk 2: word4 word5
Chunk 3: word6 word7

[download]

Thus, each group that you need to analyze is contained by $chunk->text within the for loop.

Hope this helps!

In reply to Re: Repeating the same command in different portions of input by Kenosis
in thread Repeating the same command in different portions of input by albascura

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