$/ = qq{"\$"\t""\t""\n};
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You've got too much here. It should probably be qq{\$\t\t\n}, or something similar. You've got qq{}, which is double quotes so interpolates, but then "" wrapping the pieces inside. The interior quotes are left in. Try printing $/ to see what you've got. Presumably you are not getting the DEBUG messages, which means its likely just trying to grab the whole file. Your previous post, also, doesn't mention the tabs in the record separator.

You should take, as your sample file, the first three of entries from your main file. If it works on that it should work on the rest (or die with an error).

Finally, build your script slowly. Comment out everything in the while loop. Add print $_;. If thats right, add the my $file ... line in. Print and check. Repeat. (Poor mans testing!).

qq

$/ = qq{"\$"\t""\t""\n};
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Your record separator isn't "$"<TAB>""<TAB>""(newline) is it? I think you need to get rid of all those " characters, for starters...

Hi Matija, everyone thanks for your help. I changed the regexp to qq{"\$"\t""\t""};, that solved my first problem. Now, the script won't give the files the names I want, it continues to overwrite .csv. I have changed the script a bit to


    my $i = 1;

    while ( <A> ) {
        my $file = ( split /\n/, $_ )[1] or next;
        ( $file ) = $file =~ m/"(.*?)"/ or next;

        $file = $i;
        open B, "> $file.csv"
            or warn( "Cannot open '$file': $!" ), next;
        print "[DEBUG] '$file': open ok\n";
        chomp $_;
        print B $_;
        close B or warn( "Cannot close '$file': $!" ), next;
        print "[DEBUG] '$file': close ok\n";
        $i++;
    }
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Which gives the files the names 1, 2, 3 etc. But I would like the filenames to be the name of the company. How can I achieve this? Thanks,

Jan

while($line=<>) {
  chomp $line;
  if($line =~ /^\$$/) {    #look for start of line, followed by a lite
+ral dollar sign, followed by the end of the line (not newline charact
+er, but $ has to be at the end of $line)
    close OUTFILE;
    undef $data;
    next;
  }
  if(!$data) {
    open(OUTFILE,">$line") or die;
  } else {
    $data = 1;
    print OUTFILE "$line\n";
  }
}
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btw...processing the file this way, one line at a time, is very friendly to your computer's memory. it will ever only hold a single line from your input file into memory. So it doesn't matter if input file has 50.000 lines for a particular section you want to separate out, or if it has 5 lines. Doing the "tricky" thing of changing your record delimiter would eat up lots of memory if a data section was 50,000 lines. the problem would be worse if you had malformed record delimiters e.g. "$\t\n", which is harder to debug, as the program would just fail, rather than producing (not exactly what you want) kind of output.

for( $above_post ) {s/lines/records/g; s/single line/single record/g}
# </pedantic>
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Update: Never mind me, I misread and thought this was in reply to the original post which was processing by records. However if you do the record processing it's more state you have to keep up with yourself rather than letting perl handle it for you. Not to mention that reading by lines isn't necessarily going to protect you from malformed input any better (for example someone sends you a multi-meg file with Mac \cM line endings . . .).

my ($file) = /\n.*?"(.*?)".*?\n/ or next;
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open A, '<export_gesamt.asc' 
  || die "Failed to open: $!\n";

my $line = '$';

do {
  if ( $line eq /^\$\s+$/ ) {
    my $file = <A>;
    open ( OUT ">$file" ) 
      || warn "Failed to create file '$file': $!\n";
    print "Writing $file\n";
  }
  else {
    print OUT $line;
  }
} while ( $line = <A> );
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