G'day perlato,

Welcome to the Monastery.

It looks like you were doing fine up to the flip-flop conditional (if (/TRANSACTION STARTED/ .. /TRANSACTION END/) {...}) and then got a bit lost.

You can do all the remaining processing within that if block. Here you'll want to do one of three things:

  1. If /TRANSACTION STARTED/ is TRUE, open a new file for writing. (Don't output the line.)
  2. If /TRANSACTION END/ is TRUE, close the filehandle. (Don't output the line.)
  3. Output all lines that don't match either condition in 1 or 2.

The coding required is very straightforward: 

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;

my $filename_prefix = 'pm_1155986_out_';
my $filename_suffix = '.txt';
my $filename_number = 0; 
my $out_fh;
my ($start_re, $end_re) = (qr{TRANSACTION STARTED}, qr{TRANSACTION END
+});

open my $in_fh, '<', 'pm_1155986_in.txt';

while (<$in_fh>) {
    if (/$start_re/ .. /$end_re/) {
        if (/$start_re/) {
            open $out_fh, '>',
                $filename_prefix . $filename_number++ . $filename_suff
+ix;
            next;
        }

        if (/$end_re/) {
            close $out_fh;
            next;
        }

        print $out_fh $_;
    }
}

[download]

[Note I've used the autodie pragma. This avoids having to hand-craft ... or die "..." messages for all the I/O operations: a tedious and error-prone activity (which Perl will do for you if you ask it nicely).]

Here's all the input and output data (within the spoiler):

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

— Ken

In reply to Re: Extract ranges of lines from a file, saving each range to a separate file by kcott
in thread Extract ranges of lines from a file, saving each range to a separate file by perlato

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