Your script seems to work fine when I throw away all that html stuff. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.8.8;

use warnings;

use strict;
my $del= '----------';
my @comments= ('John','Woo',$del,'Karl','Zeiss',$del,'Jehud', 'Menuhin
+',$del,'Bjoern','Borg',$del,'George','Bernhard','Shaw');

setText();

my @text=getArray();

my $flipped=flipText(@text);

print $flipped;

#first, define the subroutines

sub setText{    
    my $commentsString=join ("\n", @comments);
    open my $writeComments, '>', 'comments.txt';
    $commentsString=$commentsString . "\n----------\n";
    print $writeComments $commentsString;
    close $writeComments;
}

sub getArray{
    #you want to return an array from here
    open my $readComments, 'comments.txt';
    my @text1=<$readComments>;
    close $readComments;
    my $text=join ('', @text1);

    #at this point you should have a string, $text, comprised of
        #your text file, commentsTesting.txt as a string, including
        #\n's & -----

    @text1=split(/----------\n/, $text);
    return @text1;

    #so you've put each line into each element of the array,
        #preserving your newline chars & incl \n's & ----------
    #you've translated to a string, $text, via join, incl \n's & -----
    #you've translated back into array, (split by -----), where
        #each section is an element; note ----- are excluded
        
}

sub flipText{
    my @text1=@_;
    my @flipped=reverse(@text1);
    my $flipped1=join ("----------\n", @flipped);
    $flipped1=$flipped1 . "----------\n";
    return $flipped1;
}

#---------------------    
#prints

George
Bernhard
Shaw
----------
Bjoern
Borg
----------
Jehud
Menuhin
----------
Karl
Zeiss
----------
John
Woo
----------

[download]

You might print out (with the help of Data::Dumper) the contents of your variables at different times in your script to a log file to see exactly what happens when with what data

Btw: What exactly is wrong with the output you get? Are the lines inside some of the comments reversed or is the order of the comments not right?

In reply to Re: array gone amiss by jethro
in thread array gone amiss by bluegospel

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