Thank you all for your responses. The answer seems so obvious when I read them. 8 hours sleep doesn't hurt either :)

The $pos thing is throwing me a little bit. If I wanted to parse the vCard file in a while loop instead of slurping the whole thing into memory, how can I obtain the position of the file during the while iteration - and how could I advance to the next line of the file without breaking out of the recurse or the while?

Outside of "while(<FILEHANDLE>)" contructs I think I need a little more practice manipulating files on disk without loading everything into memory.../me goes off to read more...

Thanks again!

In reply to Re: Re: recursive parsing techniques by blahblah
in thread recursive parsing techniques by blahblah

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