I'm not sure if you want all the fields in a single data structure or in a nested one. In other words, do you want a single array of the lines, split on colons; or do you want an array of 11 arrays, with each child array containing the colon separated fields of its corresponding line?

Here is what I might do based on my current understanding: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
use constant RECORD_SIZE => 11;
 
my (@record, @lines);
 
open FOO, 'test.plx' or die;
 
while (@lines = grep defined, map scalar <FOO>, 1 .. RECORD_SIZE) {
  if (@lines == 11) {
    chomp @lines;

    # flatten into a single array ...
    @record = map split(':'), @lines;

    # ... or build an array of arrays
    # @record = map [ split ':' ], @lines;

  }
  else {
    # what to do if line count is not a multiple of RECORD_SIZE?
  } 
}

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In reply to Re: Parsing multi-line records by danboo
in thread Parsing multi-line records by chuntoon

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