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

This one: /\<author\>\s*(\D*)$search/i? That should work fine for the examples he gave. It lacks robustness; it probably isn't the best expression of what he is looking for; a tail search doesn't seem very useful; and it certainly isn't how I would write it. But it should work.

By the way, if I were to do it the way you suggested, I wouldn't bother to reinvent the flip-flop operator. I'd write it like this:

sub readrec {

    my $rec = '';

    while ( <FH> ) {
        $rec .= $_ if m|<rec>| .. m|</rec>|;
        last if m|</rec>|;
    }

    $rec;
}
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One other thing... in this construct:

while (defined($line = <FH>)) {

1. I think the practice of using defined() in that manner primarily exists because of that warning emitted by 5.004_04 and not because of a real need. The construct, while ( <FH> ) is somewhat magical and checks for definedness. I think code that included an assignment in the loop, like while ( $line = <FH> ), did not check for definedness until sometime after 5.004_04. It was, however, a minor issue in reality because "\n" and "0\n" are both true values anyway. So, you might've run into an obscure bug if you changed $/ to something like "0" but it wouldn't have affected most code.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";