in reply to Scanning a text file

You're going to want to read each complete record in so you can search and return it. Something like 
my $searchfor = shift;
$/="%%%\n"
open(IN, 'datafile.txt') or die "Could not open: $!\n";
while (<IN>) {
  print if /\Q$searchfor\E/i;
}

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Re: Re: Scanning a text file
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 09, 2004 at 16:07 UTC 
    my $searchfor = shift;
$/="%%%\n";

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    Works EXACTLY how I need. With a few modifications this will run perfectly, thank you! Do you think you could explain what $/="%%%\n"; is doing? I've never seen or used $/ before.
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[d/l]
      In case the many replies using this approach have not made it clear, you can get more information about $/ from running "perldoc perlvar", and scanning down till you see this one described (with the long name "$INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR"). Normally -- i.e. by default -- $/ = "\n" (which in reality would be "\r\n" on MS-DOS/Windows systems, "\r" on "Classic" macs, and truly "\n" on unixes).

      It's the character pattern that is removed from the end of a string when you "chomp" the string, and it is the pattern that the diamond operator looks for when reading data from a file handle into a scalar, to know when to stop. If set to "undef", it causes a single read operation to absorb the entire file and assign it all to a single scalar.

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