As a follow up to a previous question - I am (now) writing a perl script to do a search and replace (the one liners became too cumbersom) and the issue that is killing me is where the string I am searching for (in order to replace it) the string is split over two lines ... bit like this</P. 

hello there this is a bad <?string?> that 
we need to take away. Here is another bad <?st
ring?> that needs to go too.

[download]

I need to replace all the <?string?> with <xxx> (let's say)

I have this simple little script, but of course it does not span the line like I want it to

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

print "Info: ARGV is: @ARGV\n";

while (<STDIN>) {
        chomp;
        if (-e $_) { # a regular file (might be suited to your needs)
          # do something with $_ as if it were shifted from @ARGV
           print "handling file: $_\n";
           open IN, "<$_" or die "Can't open $_: $!\n";
        open OUT, ">outfile" or die "Can't open outfile: $!\n";
        while (<IN>) {
            s/<?string?>/<xxx>/g;
            print OUT;
        }
        close IN;close OUT;
        } else {
           warn "no such file: $_ \n";
        }
}

[download]

(yes, I know, I need to escape the special chars - I left them out for readability for now)

Help !

In reply to Search and replace over line break by Anonymous Monk

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