Greetings fellow monks,

needing to parse some files containing lines like the following:

alpha # this line appears only once in the whole file
beta
beta
beta
beta
beta
beta
...
beta

[download]

i wrote a loop like this:

....
while ( <FILE> ) {
    if ( /alpha/ ) {
        ....
    } else {
        ....
    }
}
....

[download]

Since the condition gets encountered only once, and then for the next n-times it will be evaluated as false, here comes my question: is there a (possibly elegant) way to get rid of the conditional block (i.e.: without using a flag variable) once the match has happened for the only one time it will?

Thanks for your kind help

In reply to A way to avoid repeated conditional loops by Deus Ex

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