First and foremost, you'll probably make your life easier in the long run if you open your code with use strict;use warnings - it'll catch a host of accidental mistakes. If you are working with tab-delimited fields, it's probably easier to use an existing parser like Text::CSV than rolling your own. Since the end-of-record markers are much rarer than tabs and new lines, you could catch that up front. And if you are concerned with formatting, it's probably easier to use sprintf to get things looking nice. Here's some basic code that (mostly) replicates what you've done, to help you with the CSV prototype:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::CSV;


my $file = "fielded.txt";

my $csv = Text::CSV->new({sep_char => "\t"});     # create a new objec
+t
open my $fh, "<", $file or die "Unable to open $file: $!";

while (my $data_ref = $csv->getline($fh)) {
    my @data = @{$data_ref};
    if ($data[0] eq "'EOU'.") {
        # End of record code
    } elsif ($data[2] eq "u") {
        print "\n$data[3]"
    } elsif ($data[2] eq "p") {
        print "$data[3]\n"
    } else {
        #die "Unexpected line format encountered, $file, @data";
    }
}
close $fh;

[download]

Update: I should point out you've made great strides since block extraction - congratulations.

In reply to Re: tab delimited extraction, formatting the output by kennethk
in thread tab delimited extraction, formatting the output by zzgulu

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