Hello Monks, hope you can help?

I'm processing a large billing data file, pipe delimited. The first field always contains a tag/descriptor. Maybe an identifier and the possibility of a value.

I have experimented and found the use of index and substr was the best way to strip out the first field. Split was to slow.

An Identifier is identified by "tagname_12" the number after the underscore.

The Value is after the tagname can be numbers/letters etc.

I have to strip down to the tag name each time and store the possibility of the identifier and the value.

The file I'm experimenting with is about 1 GB, when split was introduced process was very slow.

Sample of tags:- 

START_1 123|
FILE 2222| XXXX| AAAA|
NEW |
END_1|

[download]
Anyway any alternatives for split? Any advice will be welocme! cheers

update (broquaint): added <code> tags to sample

In reply to Alternatives to split? by Perl Apprentice

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