G'day cniggeler,

From your description, you're reading lines from a file and adding them to an array, then reading all the same lines from the array and processing them. You're doing the same work twice and you've provided no explanation why you need to do this. Is there a reason you're not just processing the lines as you read them from the file?

If your keyword lines all start the same -- e.g. "ID1", "ID2", etc. -- you can do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

{
    local $/ = 'keyword';

    while (<DATA>) {
        next if $. == 1;
        chomp;
        y/\n//d;
        print "$/$_\n";
    }
}

__DATA__
keyword1 data1 data2 data3
keyword2 data1 data2 data3
    data4 data5
    data6
keyword1 data1 data2 data3 data4
keyword3 data1
[download]

You may need to refer to local and, for $. and $/, "perlvar: Variables related to filehandles".

If the only way to differentiate keyword lines from continuation lines is by whitespace, you can do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $multiline = '';

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;

    if (0 == index $_, ' ') {
        $multiline .= $_;
    }
    else {
        print "$multiline\n" if length $multiline;
        $multiline = $_;
    }
}

print "$multiline\n";

__DATA__
keyword1 data1 data2 data3
keyword2 data1 data2 data3
    data4 data5
    data6
keyword1 data1 data2 data3 data4
keyword3 data1
[download]

Both of those scripts produce identical output:

keyword1 data1 data2 data3
keyword2 data1 data2 data3    data4 data5    data6
keyword1 data1 data2 data3 data4
keyword3 data1
[download]

If there's something else going on here, you'll need to tell us. For instance, keyword may have some associated pattern, in which case a regex solution might be more appropriate.

Please include some code with any follow-up questions; along with output, even if that's only error messages.

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