this has been an educating discussion...how about a twist? I am looking to parse a large file, and extract blocks of text that begin with the word term. I can't always anticipate how the block will end, other than by stating that whenever the word term appears, a new block begins. is there a way to create an array where each element is a text block that begins with the word term, and that element ends immediately before the next occurance of the word term?
example file: term { yada yada 12345 () ... } term only occurs here { could be 30 lines here but never that word again until another block starts yadada } term, etc. _END_
so, this file would hopefully result in an array with 3 elements. another challenge, is that the last text block will not have the word term at the end of it. thanks in advance :-) ad3

In reply to Re^2: Extracting blocks of text by adenardo
in thread Extracting blocks of text by walker

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