I have, once again, a big text file which is mostly irrelevant except for the Interesting Bit. Say for instance it's 
Line 1 blah blah blah
Line 2 blah blah blah
...
Line 1000 blah blah blah
Line 1001 --start foo--
[lots of stuff I do need to process]
Line 2000 --end foo--

[download]

So my probably not-very-programmerly instinct is to just do this: 


my $interesting_bit = 0;

while(<FILE>){

  if(/--end foo--/){
    $interesting_bit = 0;
    last; ## assuming only one interesting
          ## bit per file of course
  }

  if($interesting_bit == 1){
    ## do my processing on the lines
  }

  if(/--start foo--/){
    $interesting_bit = 1;
    # we've found the line which says
    # the next line needs to be processed
  }



}

[download]

It works for me, but is that bad practice?

Doing it this way seems quick and straightforward once you've got the order sorted out, but rather clunky -- what do other monks think?


($_='kkvvttuubbooppuuiiffssqqffssmmiibbddllffss')
=~y~b-v~a-z~s; print

In reply to Parsing Files for the Interesting Bit by Cody Pendant

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