I can, off the top of my head, think of at least three ways, which I view as distinct:

• Use Tie::File, which lets you treat a file (more or less) as an array.
• Use File::ReadBackwards, which (duh!) reads a file backwards.
• Read the file a record at a time, but keep track of the contents of the current and previous record, and print them as needed.

If your data are as shown (a name, followed by lines starting with labels, such as <id:>, <city:>, etc), something like this may work:

#!perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open($my fh, "<", $infile) or die "Could not open $infile because $!\n
+";

while(<$fh>){
    
    next if /^<id:>|^[A-Za-z]/;
    print;
}
[download]

Now, if my regex brain is turned on, this regex should skip lines which start with <id:> or start with letters. Incidently, how is this anonymyzing data if you're leaving addresses and phone numbers?

---

Update

Having noticed ww's comment in a message, I may have misread or confused the title ("Remove line above matching criteria") and "extract name and id". The regex I put in the sample above (unless I screwed it up) should skip the name and id; to skip everything else one could change the "if" to "unless".

---

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