Hello perly_white, and welcome to the Monastery!

The requirements are not entirely clear. If filenames can appear out-of-order in the input file:

Filename1 Item1 - Answer
Filename2 Item1 - Answer
Filename1 Item2 - Answer

[download]

then you will need to either (1) read the whole file into a suitable data structure before writing tables, or (2) keep track of each open file, associating the filename with the handle. For (1), you could use a hash of arrays1 like this:

my %files;
$files{Filename1} = [ 'Item1 - Answer' ];
push @{ $files{Filename1} }, 'Item2 - Answer';
...

[download]

For (2), you would need a simple hash with filename/filehandle key/value pairs.

However, it appears from the question that you know in advance that filenames cannot appear out-of-order. If that’s the case, the following skeleton script should provide a straightforward approach:

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;

# open the data file for reading
my $data_filename = 'data.txt';
open my $in_fh, '<', $data_filename;

# output files
my $current_filename = '';
my $out_fh;

while (<$in_fh>)    # process one line of data
{
    my ($new_filename, $item) = split ' ', $_, 2;

    if ($new_filename ne $current_filename)
    {
        finalize_table($out_fh) if defined $out_fh;
        open $out_fh, '>',  $new_filename;
        $current_filename = $new_filename;
        initialize_table($out_fh);
    }

    add_row($out_fh, $item);
}

close $in_fh;

finalize_table($out_fh) if defined $out_fh;

sub initialize_table { ... }

sub add_row          { ... }

sub finalize_table
{
    my ($fh) = @_;
    # ...
    close $out_fh;
}

[download]

Update: 1See perldsc#HASHES-OF-ARRAYS.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re: How to ignore and retrieve certain values from text file which is to be split into multiple HTML files with tables? by Athanasius
in thread How to ignore and retrieve certain values from text file which is to be split into multiple HTML files with tables? by perly_white

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