The regex is rather simple for this but I think split would be even better (more efficient) if you are sure they will always be seperated by a first tab and any line with a first tab is valid. I put them into an array of arrays, more efficient than a hash keyed on doc if you only ever want to read through them sequentialy. Just another way to do it.... 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @documents;
while (<DATA>) {
    # uncomment following line for the regex way
    # if (/^([\S]*.DOC)\t(.*)/) {push @documents, [$1, $2]}

    # uncomment these to use the split method
    # chomp;
    # next unless (my ($doc, $title)=split /\t/, $_, 2);
    # push @documents, [$doc, $title];

}

print "I found the following docs\n\n";
foreach (@documents) {
    print "Doc: $_->[0] \t Title: $_->[1]\n";
}

__DATA__
RS0029.DOC      INTER UNIT HARNESS REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION

RS0036.DOC      INSTRUMENT ELECTRONICS UNIT
RS0037.DOC      MECHANISM CONTROL ELECTRONICS
RS0041.DOC      IOU DESCAN MECHANISM

RS0042.DOC      IOU GENERIC MECHANISMS

[download]
Note the regex given is a bit more fussy than the obvious /(.*)\t(.*)/ which would cause you grief if the title contained a tab (if you don't know why read up about greedy pattern matching, it is very important)

Cheers,
R.

In reply to Re: searching a file, results into an array by Random_Walk
in thread searching a file, results into an array by Anonymous Monk

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