I am attempting, to use perl to place text onto new lines. I have a tab delimited file which looks similar to this.

John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up <job>Manager Books
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up <job>Manager Books <job>Manager Acounts

What I am trying to do is, where a 2nd, 3rd or more <job> appears, I want to place it onto a new line, but with the text up to the date with the information. The final output would look something like this.

John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Books

Can anybody help?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open (INPUT, "jobs.txt");
open (OUTPUT, ">newjobs.txt");

while ( <INPUT> ) {
my $TheLine = $_;

    while ($TheLine=~ [^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*##cita
+tion##[^\n]*/i)
    {
    $TheLine=~ /([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)##cita
+tion##([^\n]*)/$1\t$2\n$1\t$3\n$1\t$4/i;
    }
    while ($TheLine=~ /[^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*/i)
    {
    $TheLine=~ s/([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)/$1\t
+$2\n$1\t$3/i;
    }

print OUTPUT "$TheLine";

}
close INPUT;
close OUTPUT;

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In reply to Placing text onto multiple lines by Anonymous Monk

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