Sadly it doesn't. I'm not sure if things are complicated by the fact that the text field can contain asteris that are not considered part of a comment e.g. 
case1
aaa|bbb|ccc|ddd|eee|fff * hhh /*xyzxyz*/ abc
or
case2
aaa|bbb|ccc|ddd|eee|fff * hhh /*xyz
sss|ddd|ggg|hhh|jjj|xyz*/ abc
or
case3
aaa|bbb|ccc|ddd|eee|fff * hhh /*xyz
jjj|kkk|lll|ppp|ooo|blah blah blah
sss|ddd|ggg|hhh|jjj|xyz*/ abc

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Sometimes the comment block is in the same record, at other times it spans 1 or more records. So in the example I would still need to check (fff * hhh and abc ) to see if they met my pattern match (becuase they're outside the comment block. Having had only limited Perl exposure this is really taxing me.

In reply to Re^5: while loop logic by Anonymous Monk
in thread while loop logic by Anonymous Monk

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