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.

Regexen are not only tough, they're cool too, which is probably the reason why you want to use them in the first place. Said all this, and considering that I've not read in detail the description of your problem nor your attempt, just take into account that:

• It's {sometimes,often} convenient to use two or more regexen rather than a single one (although trying to do it with the latter can be tempting or even appealing),
• For fixed length substring extraxction it's convenient to take a look at substr and unpack as well.

Update: Incidentally, no such a thing as PERL. See: perldoc -q 'difference between "perl" and "Perl"'.

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