Greetings perl monks,

Today my dilemma is reorganizing files. I actually have both a problem and a question. Say I'm starting with 2 files R1 and R2, as follows:

R1-something.txt     R2-something.txt
DESCRP a             DESCRP a
2                    3
3                    1
DESCRP b             DESCRP c
3                    5
4                    9
[download]

and I want to rearrange them so instead I have files

a.txt     b.txt      c.txt
R1a       R1b        R2c
2         3          5
3         4          9
R2a
3
1
[download]

I have the files R1, R2 stored in fileArray and I think this should output them the way I would like:

foreach my $file (@{$fileArray})
{
    open (INPUT, "< $file") || die "Could not open $file\n";
    while (<INPUT>)
    {          
          if ($_ =~ /^DESCRP/)
          { 
                #get name of element
            chomp (my $newFileName = substr($_, 7));
                #open/create file of that name
            open OUTPUT, ">> $newFileName.txt" || die "Could not open 
+$_.txt\n";
                #print the specific elements name
            print OUTPUT substr($file,0,2).$newFileName."txt\n";
           } 
           else 
           {
                 #or print the values following the element
              print OUTPUT $_;
           }
    }
    close OUTPUT;
    close INPUT;
}
[download]

First, my problem is that when I try to print the values after each element, my OUTPUT handle is closed because it is out of scope from where I open it, and I am not sure how to keep it open.

My question is: Do you have a more efficient/aesthetic way of doing this?

Thanks for your time :)

-Thomas

P.S. the data sets I will actually be working with are much larger (1000s of lines and a dozen 'R_' files), but they will be generally like this.

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