Well the html file that comes back to my program lets say test.html has certain entries like location country etc...

so the file looks like this ;Cost Center Desc.
;FX IT EFX;

;Town
;London ;

So what i want to do is search for town, and then grab the answer of the next line..

Something like $line =~ /Town/ , and the answer i am looking for is the next line which is London. You see these came from a table in html format, and i stripped out the html so i just have text, so this is what i am left with..

#!/home/cuthbe/bin/perl

open(T,"test.html") || die ("Unable to open file. $!\n");
foreach (<T>) {
        s/<[^>]+>//g;
        s/&nbsp//g;
        s/<!//g;
        if($_ =~ /Town/) { printf $$; }
        #printf;
}
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Edited by Chady -- added code tags.

How about something like this:

open(T,"test.html") || die ("Unable to open file. $!\n");
while(<T>) {
# preprocessing with s/.../ as above
    if (/^;Town/) {
        $town = <T>;
        chomp $town;
        $town =~ s/;//g;
        print "Found a town: $town\n";
    }
}
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Note, I've only tested this very quickly. It could probably do with better error handling etc...

i Did find a quick way that does work very well.

If you have an file that looks something like this
; Notes ID
; bhenry


this will work

open(R,"file.html") || die("errro, $1n\"); 
    while (<R>) {
     $pattern = "Notes ID"; 
     next if ! /$pattern/;        
     die "End of EOF \n" if ! defined ($_=<R>);
     $_ =~ s/<[^>]+>//g; # This just removes HTML Tages 
     $_ =~ s/<!//g; # This removes more HTML tages 
     $_ =~ s/&nbsp//g; # Remove HTML spaces 
     $_ =~ s/;//g; # remove ; 
     printf ("$pattern = $_ \n"); # Print patter
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