Greetings Monks,

I have a data file in which some of the time the information is split into multiple lines like this: 

somedata data blah \
continuation of previous line \
another continuation of previous line \
stand alone line
stand alone line
multiple line \
continuation of multiple line

[download]
My question is how can I either 1) combine the multiple lines in advance or 2)join on the fly while reading the files in line by line? 
while(<F>) {
    if (multiple line) {
      #somehow look ahead and collapese
    } else {
      #its a single line so just process
    }
}

[download]
Thanks for any suggestions.

In reply to Question on parsing a text file. by yoda54

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