Hello oh knowledge masters.   You guys have helped me along the way to learning about PERL, so I find myself stuck again.   I have a large file that I read into an array, and I need to strip out information that is not needed.   Now the first 16 characters of the data I want to keep(for every record), and then after that I want to keep 30 characters before and 30 charaters after another set string.

I wrote the regex like this: 
foreach $i(@n){
    $i =~s/\s//gm;
    }
foreach $i(@n){
    unless ($i =~ /^\d{16}/) else ($i =~ /.{30}Some search string.{30}
+/)
    $i =~ s/.//gm;}
    }

[download]
The first part is for clean up, the second part is where I am having the problems.   After my matches are found then everything else should just be deleted.   Am I atleast in the right nieghborhood?

Please help.

janitored by ybiC: Minor format cleanup, including balanced <code> tags around snippet

In reply to regex man they are tough by tgolf4fun

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