A couple of points. First of all, your return logic seems off in your two test subs. Hazarding a guess, I'd say you just wrapped the foreach loops around your previous version that dealt with only one pattern -- but now a line must match *all* the patterns to succeed (it'll return 'undef' if any don't match). I'm thinking you want isbeg() (and isend()) to return true if *any* one of the re's matches the line: 

sub isbeg {
  my $test = shift;
  foreach (@beginnings) { return 1 if $test =~ /$_/ }
  return;
}

sub isend {
  my $test = shift;
  foreach (@endings) { return 1 if $test =~ /$_/}
  return;
}

[download]

As for your parsing loop, you can use the range operator in scalar context (flip-flop op): 

foreach my $line (@lines) {
  push @extracted, $line if isbeg($line) .. isend($line);
  last if isend($line);
}

[download]

You could drop the 'last' statement if the data might have more than one valid section you want to grab.

Also, a style note about your use of 'return undef' -- to return a generic false value just use 'return' with no arguments: it'll return undef in scalar context and an empty list in list context. Thus, not only it is shorter to type, it is more versatile as well.

In reply to Re: Parse Loops with flat text files. (code) by danger
in thread Parse Loops with flat text files. (code) by deprecated

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