Agreement. The key point is that you can't read part of the data, do the match, and then expect to be able to read all of the data. Instead, read each record, see if it matches, then print it. If paragraph mode doesn't work (i.e. not always a blank line between records), you can do it manually with something like: 
sub readrec
{
   my $line;
   my $inrec;
   my $rec;

   while (defined($line = <FH>)) {
      last if $line eq "</ref>\n";
      $rec .= $line if $inrec;
      $inrec ||= $line eq "<ref>\n";
   }
   $rec;
}

[download]
(This actually strips off the <ref> and </ref> tags; if you want to preserve them, reverse the order of the lines in the while loop.)

You could also parse the record as you read it, but to search any of the fields, its probably more convenient to return just a string to match against, and split it up into the components if it matches.

(BTW, the OP's match statement doesn't look as if it would work at all.)

(updated to remove comment about match based on misunderstanding)

In reply to Re: Re: Searching data file by ysth
in thread Searching data file by parisa

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