okay. i am slowly getting there. you are correct, the delimiter should have been in "<hr>\r"such that it was slurping the entire file in with '<hr>\r'. however, as it stands now, the following changes to the program only reads in the first record and then quits without looping to the next record: 
my $allDocs = do
   {
       local $/ = "<hr>\r";
       <>;
   };

my $rxExtractDoc = qr
   {(?xms)
           (<h4>Award\s\#(\d+)(.*?)<hr>)  
   };

while ($allDocs =~ m{$rxExtractDoc}g )
{
    my %award = (); # award hash
       $award{'record'}= $1;
    $award{'A_awardno'}= $2; 
       $award{'entireaward'}= $3;
#    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\n//g;
    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\t//g;
    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\r//g;
  
      if ($award{'entireaward'} =~ m{Dollars Obligated(.*?)\$([^<]+?)<
+}gi){
        $award{'B_dollob'} = $2};

[download]
{the rest of the code continues.} But it doesn't loop to the next record once it finishes extracting the first record? And I am not sure why? Thoughts? Thank you so much again. This is very helpful (and I am at wits end as is) :-) Also, someone mentioned that there is no input....I have the file on the command line such that <> refers to it. Is that not correct?

In reply to Re^2: Large file data extraction by micwood
in thread Large file data extraction by micwood

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